Cloud Computing | cloudsommelier

I recently asked my friends on Facebook and Twitter to help me fill out a survey. I have a secret admission: my intention was not to create or propose a new Netflix / Hulu / iTunes functionality. My intention was to see how many of my friends, who are relatively tech savvy, would reveal their propensity to share personal data
with an online video service. And it turns there are 4 brave souls who would share data! I want to raise
my glass to these 4 brave souls, and yet, part of me thinks they should be more hesitant.

Question 1:

To be fair, 100% of the survey respondents said yes to whether or not they had a Netflix / Hulu / iTunes service. This was satisfying to me, because I would expect no less of my friends. If someone did mark it as a no, I would have lost my mind trying to figure out who is still living in the 20th century. They probably chose not to fill the survey … so the final results here may be biased 🙂

Question 2:

The second question was also a filler question. Most of the people I know watch 30 minutes to an hour off an online video service.

Question 3

The third question is where it gets interesting. Let’s call this functionality S. I want to see this Functionality S in Netflix / Hulu / Movies on iTunes because I always fall asleep watching an episode or a movie before my wife does. And then going back the next day to watch the program means you have to watch the entire program from the start or struggle with streaming it to the exact spot (which I neverget exactly correct). Any small help in getting close to the spot where I fell asleep would help. I admit this is a very trivial problem; however, introducing ease of use in any product has always made it a great sale.

So what did my friends say? Apparently they agreed in majority. 70% of my friends thought it would be beneficial to have this option. 30 % said no, and no one skipped this question. I don’t know how many of the 30% have no partner / husband / wife. That is a piece of data I didn’t want to collect for obvious reasons.

Question 4:

For the next question, however, the tables turned. A large majority (greater than 80%) said no in regards to sharing any information about your partner / husband / wife to enable the Function S with the online service. In fact, some of you (slightly greater than 15%) might have been so turned off by the idea that you skipped this question. There were only 4 individuals who would share this data! Are these 4 brave souls or fools?

Side note: I wonder if anyone noticed that it was on the next page on purpose, to make sure there is little bias on the previous item from this question.

Thoughts:

I completely agree with the notion that sharing private details with an online video service can be difficult. However, I have to ask myself, most of the avenues where I asked the question are social media-based online services (cloud based services). These are online services where we are already exchanging this information. And with data mining and big data tools, being able to predict some of the semi-private information about your family has become easier. We all tag our spouses and partners on Facebook and Google+ pictures. Most of us exchange our family and partner’s geo data in our pictures and tweets as well. So what’s the harm in providing the partners’ basic information to an online video service?

The question becomes, are these 4 people actually smart to trade off functionality and ease of use for exchanging data that is already available? Or have they just given up the privacy and acknowledge that in this day and age it is not possible to maintain? And for the rest of us, why are we exchanging private data with sites like Facebook and Google+ but not others?

Results

By the way, I don’t get to see the personal information of any of the respondents.

Credits:

I produced the graphs using Tableaupublic.com. For a deeper dive of the results, you can view it at https://public.tableausoftware.com/views/Onlinevideoinfosharingsurvey_0/Dashboard1?:embed=y&:showTabs=y&:display_count=yes.

What is Cloud?

For a technical definition of cloud computing please see the National Institute of Science and Technology’s definition of Cloud Computing. In my opinion, Cloud is a term that refers to anything that is delivered “as a service”. The term “as a service” means you use it when you need it, but you don’t have to own it to use it. You probably also shouldn’t care about how it is delivered as long as it meets your requirements.

For the sake of simplicity, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are cloud services that provide interactions to their customers as and when required. Just 20 years ago, if you wanted to send your favorite pictures to grandma or to your friends, you had to buy a physical album, and mail it to them. Now this whole process can be turned around in seconds, and can be viewed all over the world. No more buying an album—Facebook provides that facility as and when you want it.

Impact on Business

Let’s translate this into a business scenario: cloud computing communication options like Webex, Slideshare, etc. have revolutionized business interaction. Now you can work from home, airport, hotel room, or coffee shop and interact with your customer. This changed the travel industry as more and more businesses required essential travel only. Just a few years ago, when you wanted to present an idea or pitch a sale to clients or management in different offices, you would have to travel around the country, schedule travel schedules and get everyone in the same room. Now all you have to do is make sure the calendars are aligned and the presentation can be worked on. Does that mean human interaction is dead? No! The level of the human interaction has significantly increased because of the increased frequency of online touch, and our ability to use services as and when you want them in the cloud. In these scenarios, cloud acts like a tool to increase human interaction. And like any tool, it is how you use it that makes the difference.

Real World Examples

For example: In 2009, a US based retail business customer came to the organization I was working for at the time with a problem: they faced major competition from online retailers and their in-store shopping model had taken a beating. To compete in their industry, they needed to completely revise how their customers were interacting with their organization and buying products. However, given their older systems and their past performance, they did not have the budget available to make a major upfront investment in building solutions to make their customer experience better, let alone retrain their staff to implement and manage those new solutions. And considering the timing: 2008-09 recession period, this was also not a good time to get managements / investors to make major investments in any business. We helped them deal with this situation by delivering to them a cloud based solution for e-commerce. We kept the upfront investments down by replacing this with on-going costs which matched their usage of resources and sales. Retailers in America love this because 3 months out of the 12, they have a great spike in sales and then most of the year, can be slim pickings at best. The impact was that retail business was able to survive the recession, able to come out leaner and meaner, and able to face competition from the online retailers in their industry.

In another case, we recently had a small business come to us that competes with the organizations much bigger in size and scale, in their industry. Their major issue was that they had no idea how well their discount campaigns worked. While larger companies can typically tell how their campaigns are working, this small organization didn’t know if the customers who were cashing in the discounts, were loyal and how quickly were they interacting with their organization due to these campaigns. This was primarily because the organization could not combine customer data (from loyalty email registrations) to data from sales. Plus the small business had a very limited technical staff, so deploying any IT solution to help combine the multiple data sources, was next to impossible. So we developed a cloud based solution where we managed the solution, and combined the data sources and delivered reporting on the impact of discount campaigns. In this case, we were managing the whole IT solution in the cloud, so that the customer could derive the business value, and limit their attention to business problems.

In the end, one of the lessons to be learned is that cloud computing a tool to solve problems. At the end of the day, it is a hammer, but it needs its nail: a business or personal problem, that must be solved to make it valuable.

Feel free to leave a comment 🙂