How much is the cloud costing you?
In the bright new world of Software As A Service (SAAS) our software sits on a server somewhere and is made available to us in a web browser or a client app, connected over the internet. Nobody doubts that this is the future of software, least of all me, since I’m a habitual early adopter and I would rather keep all the disk space on my MacBook Pro available for music, photos and video 
That said, this bright new world comes at a cost. I’m now paying $60 a month for 60GB of data on a DSL2 connection and about $40 a month in iPhone data charges, of which a significant chunk is accessing cloud resources. But that’s just the beginning — I’m now paying about $2,000 a year in SAAS software subscriptions!
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Back in the bad old pre-SAAS days, I paid about $600 for a copy of Microsoft Office. Granted, it was buggy as hell, I couldn’t access my files from another machine, and it didn’t do any of the collaborative, CRM or media functions that some of my cloud apps will do. And I should also note that a big chunk of my business is made possible by Google Apps, which I get for free even though I am apparently the only person in the world who doesn’t click on sponsored listings in search results.
Still, thank goodness the cost of cloud storage and processing is coming down so fast, because the cost of subscribing to the software is more significant than I realised. I’m not complaining, mind, I’m just thinking twice about ordering that shiny new iPad+3G because I think I just spent the money on the cloud.
