Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt and Apple's iCloud

Apple's SaaS system has been shown to be bunk. Apple's own customer service people gave away a reporter's identity to a hacker, CNN reported, who proceeded to trash it and destroy files. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak came out and said, as Phys.org reported, "Cloud is scary."

No, Steve. Cloud is not scary. Apple is scary. Proprietary systems that call themselves cloud are scary. Lack of secure identity is very scary. But cloud is not scary.

Only iCloud is scary.

In Steve's defense, he's 61. (I am just a child of 57.) He hasn't worked at Apple since 1987. Maybe we should ignore him.

But a lot of people, and companies, are using similar arguments. They are trying to stall the adoption of cloud technology by specifying proprietary technologies, as OpenForum Europe revealed in a report last week. As Louis Sullivan wrote in Business2Community recently, corporate America is moving as slowly as it can into cloud technology, based in part on this kind of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, or FUD.

What investors should know is it isn't going to work. False claims and phony arguments designed to stop new technology from being implemented widely never work in the long run. Cloud technology is going to win, as surely as PCs overcame mini-computers, as surely as the client-server beat the mainframe, as surely as tablets beat the PC.

Cloud is going to win because it's better, it's more capable and it's cheaper than what has come before. The only question is when, and the only answer is (thanks to the Woz) not yet.

At the time of publication, Blankenhorn was long AAPL, GOOG and IBM.

This article is commentary by an independent contributor, separate from TheStreet's regular news coverage.