Cloud Architectures and Cultural Memory - Challenges of Information Management Beyond the Cloud - page 12

vendors that behave irresponsibly, disingenuously, and destructively with regard to
back compatibility; the history here is not good and does not fill one with confidence.
Also remember that given the interdependence and layering in software environments
a decision by one vendor (especially at the operating system level) may mean that a
great deal of software from other vendors stops working suddenly.
Standards are a certain amount of protection against surprise or forced
obsolescence because, at least on a good day, sometimes you can get software
vendors to adhere to standards and give you some advance warning when they are
going to stop supporting them; you often have a broader choice of tools and
marketplace alternatives if it is a well-established market standard. But standards are
sometimes there when you want them, sometimes they are not; sometimes the
adoption rates are high, other times in other areas the adoption rates are smaller.
So this sets up a very, very dangerous situation: imagine a couple of years from
now that we are operating in a cloud software environment. I do not own any software
anymore; indeed, what I am doing is paying a subscription for it. And when I sign on
to use the service, I get whatever the vendor decides is the current version.
Now there are a couple of bad things that happen here. One, of course, is that if I
hit some financial reversals: I cannot use my content anymore because I can no longer
afford to pay the rent on the tool to use it, or perhaps I have chosen (or been forced) to
store my content in the application-as-a-service environment, and I have lost my
content too. Worse: you connect up and your updates start applying and when all your
updates are finished, you discover that the latest and greatest version of whatever this
is does not support some of your old formats and now all of a sudden, you have a
collection of orphaned content. Maybe the vendor did not think this was important;
maybe you missed the announcement; maybe you were away for a while and did not
realize that you had a one-month window to convert from old to new format in
preparation for the new release. But the net effect is the same.
In that situation, you cannot do any of the things that we do today when that
happens because of a new software release, you cannot say “well I think maybe I'm
not going to go with that update and I'll go to my backup and I'll run last year's
version for a couple of years while I figure out what to do with all the material that
would otherwise be orphaned”. You cannot go on E-bay looking for an old version of
the software to run on a new machine because the old version of the software
disappeared into the vaults of the software cloud provider and is never going to be
seen again - withdrawn from marketing really means gone! Basically what the
applications clouds do is raise the specter of having the pacing of the ability to read
old formats move entirely to the mercy of the software suppliers.
I think that how we operate in this world is an enormous challenge; it has a little bit
of an echo of some of the stories that have been going around recently about
electronic topic readers going wild and deciding that you are in a country where this
material is not licensed so it is just going to erase your library. Or, of course, the
classic but true story from a few years ago of Amazon erroneously deciding that the
version of Orwell's 1984 that they had been making available was in fact covered by
copyright and needed to be disappeared from all the Kindles in the field. That actually
did happen (and of course the fact they picked that topic is just mindboggling but this
is actually a true story). We really begin to see here, I think, the potential that not just