Nothing too profound here to say, other than over the past month or so, there have been some interesting “complications” with cloud computing.  “Cloud computing” being the paradigm shift where people move computing power from personal computers to giant invisible computer servers in the sky  to a system of servers whose location and details of which are not all that important (only that they are accessible).

Personally, I use the phrase to describe the offloading of services and applications from personal computers into online applications, where data and applications can be accessible anywhere there is internet access.

Cool and portable?  Sure.

But cloud computing is predicated upon the stability and redundancies of those invisible computers in the sky servers; when the reliability goes out the window, so does the premise of cloud computing.  Case in point?  The services offered by 37Signals, such as Backpack, Highrise, and BaseCamp which honest-to-goodness businesses rely on for productivity crumped today.  Services went down for 2 hours as their *own* provider tanked.

Case in point numero dos?  How about Omnidrive.  I wrote about it glowingly several months ago (and it was showered with praise many months ago by TechCrunch), as a fantastic tool that allows you to back up data online and so that you can carry stuff with you no matter where you go (if you have an internet connection).  In December, due to server issues it was out for such a long time people thought that it had gone into the Deadpool.

Is “cloud computing” ready for prime time?  I think its hard to tell, but clearly there need to be redundancies built into your own “systems” or way of doing things, in the event that your favourite web service does go down.  Until those companies (e.g. Amazon’s S3) guarantees “uptime” in the same way that hosting companies do (and may be they do — let me know if that’s the case), it might be hard to have mission-critical data and productivity rely on said services.