Sometimes in the buzz and hype of new technology being offered, commonsense factors are overlooked.
One of those is the role of corporate accountants. While they are not the villains here, they are paid to do a job, and that job is reasonably inevitable. So it would be foolish to ignore the future implications to the industry.
Something that cloud developers know right now but havent told their corporate accountants yet, is that the hardware economy of scale argument for a cloud app is not what they think.
The core pricing calculation is based on the premise that there are economies of scale.. many customers sharing server resources. Developers know that is only achievable if the load is spread by users logging in at equidistant different timeslots. If everyone decides to log in at once, any efficiency is negated - the reverse happens - it creates an expensive bottleneck. Why is it expensive? Because of ISP charges. Surprisingly, when you subscribe to a cloud app, both you and the vendor pay ISP charges. You pay for internet, and the Vendor also pays a substantial cost for the bandwidth to host all the clients at their end. So the glaring contradiction to the 'technology cost reduction proposition' is the introduced ISP costs at both ends. In a client server application that all came for free. You're all now paying for an extra service you didnt need before. Thats why the ISP companies are promoting Cloud - guess who is the biggest beneficiary? They have managed to fabricate a whole new cost component, on an unreliable service, while convincing everyone to be grateful for it!
So here's what will inevitably happen two years down the road: Your software response will get slower. Perhaps imperceptibly at first, you might lose say 7% productivity per month and not be able to put your finger on it. But that’s what slow screen refreshes will do to your business.
And here's why it’s happening: Vendor's corporate accountants will inevitably review their monthly costs and notice a substantial cost component called Peak ISP Traffic. They will ask their ISP how to reduce it. To which the answer is simple and delivers substantial cost savings.. throttle the traffic bandwidth at peak times. This is of course what is actually required to make cloud economic. But the downside is for the users. Providing you want to do all your work after hours, you won't notice. But increasingly around Friday afternoons and End Of Month, just when your staff need peak performance, the speed will decrease to a frustrating level. Call it cynicism, but this post-cost-cutting adjustment is as inevitable as downsized burgers.
It may be difficult to detect initially and there are plenty of technical excuses to offer. They might blame your ISP, suggesting that you need to pay for a faster connection. But that will in fact make no difference if its their server that is running slow. But manufacturers are not easily fooled. We understand benchmarking. I predict a lot of manufacturers will physically measure the productivity loss, decide it's unacceptable and will be scrambling back to the more reliable client server platform, and stop feeding the hungry ISPs.
See the following article for an interesting technical insight into the Vendors dilemma: