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Go ahead, fill in the missing parts for your reason for moving to (something)-as-a-service or for moving (noun) to the Cloud. This past weekend, I would have used “printing is too frustrating!” I take a lot of pictures, and I have about a dozen framed and on display in my office. I took the photos, I printed them, I cut the mats and I made the frames. I did that 6 years ago and it was faster, better and less expensive than any options I had at the time. I wanted to swap out 6 of the 12 prints; a process that I thought would be easy. I printed the new pictures, but they didn’t fill the openings in the mats. I’ll spare you the frustrating details, the problem was that HP doesn’t make a driver for 64-bit Windows 7 and Microsoft isn’t any better at writing printer drivers than they were in 1994. The solution required firing up an aging Windows XP machine and an old copy of Photoshop.

An alternative solution would have been to order the 6 prints from SnapFish (or some other service) for about $3 each – I spent more on a new ink cartridge. I didn’t opt for the alternative because I wanted to hang these pictures up the next day; photo printing services are fast, but they aren’t that fast, at least not on a holiday. It is clear, however that I am unlikely to ever print 8”x10” photos at home in the future. In fact, since I can pick these prints up at the local Walgreens, I may never bother to print any photos ever again.

This is the combination of forces that will gradually move me, or at least portions of me to the cloud. When it becomes so easy, so cheap and when it offers as good or better quality compared to what I can do at home, it becomes a no-brainer. At work, the same dynamic is in effect. We need to do a major overhaul on our public website. We don’t do much more than display static content and offer a means to get some questions answered on that site. Our goal is to have a more modern look, and to make it easy for more of our employees to make changes. Hmmm, easy for employees to change a website – does that sounds like SharePoint? It does to me too and we are currently working to move our public website to a cloud-based SharePoint offering.

This isn’t a sea change, this is more like erosion.  I have written about why cloud-based solutions don’t appeal to me, don’t work for our company and give me all sorts of agita. Well, the cloud is creeping into my life, and when it makes sense, I’m not fighting it.