this is a bit like flying vs driving. If you're in the drivers seat you have control - you hope - and your destiny is in your own hands, if you're in a plane it is someone else driving (unless you are an airline pilot). The accident rate is lower for planes per mile flown but if it goes wrong then it usually does so in ways that make the headlines. Still, more people die driving than flying.

When the 'cloud' goes down (or at least some part of it) then you'll notice this immediately because of the large number of sites going down all at once. But when you compare it with the accumulated downtime of all those users had they not been 'cloud users' but hosted on their own kit then it is very well possible that the balance is still in favour of hosting in the cloud.

Utter nonsense. Overlaying a racist agenda onto the shift from Myspace to Facebook is ridiculous. Neither have any barier to entry. Abandoning Yahoo! for Google might also shadow the population changes the author alludes to, but does that make google users racist? No. EDIT: the new original link provides more reasoned context - but even then, the data appears very, very weak [~4 anecdotal data points, all 17-year-olds]. If the point were valid it would be troubling, but I'm not convinced on the evidence provided.

First, read the actual article, not this poorly regurgitated bullshit (http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html). Second, recognize the fact that Danah Boyd does actual research and generally knows her shit. Third, understand that she specifically says that we wouldn't expect to see the problem because there's no barrier to entry, yet we do anyways, which makes it that much more disturbing.

As usual, Jeff mixes different concepts, does some hand-waving and comes to a stunningly weird conclusion. What Microsoft did with artificial memory limitation is ridiculous, unless someone comes up to offer a reasonable technical explanation. However, I find it equally ridiculous to jump from there to a conclusion that open source is better because it does no market segmentation.

Let's keep one thing clear, if you're not selling your product then you won't do any market segmentation for it. You might, however, do market segmentation when it comes to offering support for that product. Does that make you as evil as Microsoft? Are 37 Signals evil because they offer different plans whose prices probably don't scale linearly with the costs behind them (in other words, they don't get the same profit across plans)?

Of course, Jeff didn't actually use the word "evil", but the implication of moral inferiority is almost palpable. Open source has many advantages (and disadvantages, too), but not segmenting the market is not one of those; rather, it's a consequence of not selling the software itself.