the cloud is not free, it’s convenience for where you are in the world.

Just felt like writing about this today.

Not because I wanna ramble about it but I just wanted to get it off my chest.

It’s that old story of a client that wants changes, changes you can’t really charge for because you’ve made it so fast that you don’t mind doing it but one day you just get to the point where you think, just let them have access, take a copy incase they break it and let them go to town with it.

I recently gave away the keys to the castle to the ability to edit their stuff in the cloud, remotely, from any computer digitally connected to the internet, from anywhere in the world, powerful stuff, not just sitting on a laptop somewhere at home in the office, literally anywhere.

Photo by Kenrick Mills on Unsplash

Client messaged me this morning to see if there was possible to ‘get around’ payment for assets that I used on the document — I wanted to be able to easily update it from anywhere you seem, iPad, tablet on the road, and download the pdf and email them it from even on the road.

I think I’ve spent more time in all my years in computing to try and educate people on the business model and the technology behind a product than actually the client getting excited of what it allows them to do — it’s like a ‘trying to convince you’ curve that I’ve pretty much just given up doing because it’s so tiring and exhausting to educate people on it when they wanna get in and out, I get it, time is money.

But thing is I actually love that stuff, it’s a culture change, these tools are not just the static ways of working like we have always done, some pirated copy of word on a cheap ass pc laptop that you hope will just last a little longer so you can squeeze the last pound of value out of before consigning it to the not-recycling hill of plastic ooze seeping into the water table sitting for fifty years in that landfill at the back of your garden.

Anywhays.

I think AOL and shiny cd’s has a lot to answer for from the early days of the internet where you would get a FREE thousand hours of time on the internet, everyone thinks stuff on the internet is free, heck the majority of us get hours of what appears to be free video content daily on YouTube, music from soundcloud and spotify — there is just a wealth of stuff out there ya know that you don’t always see the cost or how the makers make their income from the time they spend on it.

The majority of people don’t even care, they just want the fix, the solution, to get their business humming, to have control over their own stuff, maybe not even thinking about it creatively and optimising it for greater success. That’s not me, I have to tinker, I have to play, I have to make it better, faster, smarter, because it turn it makes me want to learn more, to learn how to optimise my stress and anxiety out of a tool — bend it to my will if you like, get the most out of the tool and find it’s limitations.

I’m sure you have a handful of Digital tools in your digital tool belt that have changed your life for the better — I know blockchain has most certainly done that for me, giving me a digital immutable ledger in the cloud, distributed, shared, accountable, in sync with a network of machines across the planet.

Cheers for Reading,