I’m a big fan of convenience and I bet you are too. What’s not to love? I think if you’re honest, you’ll agree that the quest for convenience is a determining factor in most of the decisions that we make on a regular basis. Think about it. If you’re hungry but don’t feel like going through the machinations of preparing a meal, there are a wealth of alternatives ready to help pacify your stomach pangs without requiring you to even leave your car. Cutting the lawn a major inconvenience to your weekend golf plans? Do what I did and let your kids cut it for you. Not only does it free me up for 18 whenever I want, but it also spares Mrs. Crosby the inconvenience of wondering where they are. Does anyone disagree that convenience is such an important component of our lives that we are even willing to pay more for it? Sure the station with the cheapest gas is only two miles away, but why put in the extra time behind the wheel when the place on the corner is only a nickel more per gallon? I think you get my point. Unfortunately, as more than a few cloud providers — and their customers — are finding out, the cost of convenience can be a little more than we’d care to pay.
As the good folks at Target found out last Christmas season, customer satisfaction is negatively impacted when the shopper who bought some wrapping paper online from their home in Phoenix, opens their post-holiday statement to find that they also purchased a 50-in. flat screen in Schenectady. Let’s face it, whenever we do anything online like apply for a new driver’s license or buy a book on Amazon we enter into an implicit agreement with the provider of the service: In return for providing me with a convenient method for conducting this transaction, I’ll give you personal information that I don’t even share with my spouse and you agree to protect it from all ill-intentioned parties including that dorky kid down the street and any apparatchik sitting behind a computer screen in Guangdong Province. No one enters into this arrangement believing it to be a Faustian bargain. And therein lies the rub for many of today’s cloud providers.