Giusto dieci anni fa Acer lanciava, con una adeguata campagna mediatica, ma specialmente ossessionando gli acquirenti dei loro prodotti con ripetuti e non minimizzabili messaggi, di utilizzare il loro cloud. Nel 2014 il presidente e CEO Jason Chen lanciò in pompa magna il progetto BYOC (Build Your Own Cloud) e con esso una serie di “Smart BYOC Products” che dovevano servire a trasferire tutto il nostro lavoro e la nostra conoscenza nel loro cloud.
Non è stato facile evitare i continui inviti a salvare i documenti nell’ “ACER cloud” perché OGNI applicazione puntava alla loro soluzione che fu fallimentare e chiusa dopo appena quattro anni.
Abbiamo tenuto duro e nel 2018 il servizio veniva chiuso con un preavviso limitato e con l’impossibilità, per molti, di recuperare i materiali salvati richiedendo un account BYOC che nel frattempo era stato chiuso dalla stessa ACER…
Ribadisco ancora una volta come l’affidarsi a servizi estemporanei e privi di una visione a lungo termine sia una perdita di tempo, di dati, di energie e di soldi per tutti noi clienti e utenti.
Se avete delle cose importante selfhostatele (morisse un grammar nazi leggendolo) e abbiatene il pieno controllo. Wikipedia ci ricorda alcuni vantaggi:
- The user has complete control over their data and can decide how and where it is hosted.
- The user can customize the site design and functionality according to their preferences and needs.
- The user can potentially save money by using a lower-cost hosting service or combining multiple services on one server.
- The user can improve their skills and knowledge by learning how to set up and manage their own server and services.
- The user can avoid relying on third-party providers that may have privacy issues, security breaches, outages, or changes in policies.
P.S. Acer, nonostante avesse gli account degli utenti registrati, non ha mai avvisato a mezzo email o un banner magari invasivo quanto quello dell’annuncio della decisione di chiudere il servizio. Peccato Jason (che è rimasto CEO), sarà per prossima.
Riporto come promemoria per chi volesse avventurarsi in iniziative estemporanee e modaiole senza una strategia, gli articoli di lancio dell’iniziativa e della relativa chiusura.
Documenti e informazioni
Leggiamo l’articolo pubblicato su TechRadar il 29 aprile 2024 (fonte – permalink):
Is Acer CEO Jason Chen gambling by banking on BYOC?
Juan Martinez published April 29, 2014
Personal cloud adoption could mean big bucks for Acer
Four months into his tenure as Acer CEO and President, Jason Chen has revealed his company vision: to make Acer the personal cloud service for consumers.
Speaking at a press conference in New York City, Chen said Acer’s focus will be on providing consumers with a technology platform stored on a localized PC hard drive that will enable consumers to reach all of their data, all of the time, on any device.
Chen has coined his vision, “BYOC” or bring your own cloud, and he said it evolved from research Acer conducted to determine where consumers were storing the majority of their data.
“Cloud is a great concept,” Chen said, at the press conference. “But the number one place people keep their data is in their PC hard drive.”
Despite a burgeoning market of cloud technologies geared toward the general consumer, namely Amazon Cloud, Apple iCloud and Google Drive, consumers continue to rely on their localized hard drives to store data.
Gartner Research projects only 36% of consumer-owned digital content will be stored in the cloud by 2016. As of last year, 55% of consumers had never used a cloud storage service, and as of two years ago 51% of people said they believed stormy weather could interfere with cloud computing (they were incorrect, in case you were one of the respondents).
Chen said consumers feel safer, more secure and they feel they have more control with data stored on hard drives. “If you can keep your storage under control, in a place that you can feel secure, that will be your own cloud,” he said.
However, Acer is willing to gamble on the future of cloud, and more importantly, the willingness of consumers to adopt and regularly use a personal cloud device. The Taiwan-based company is willing to share its platform across brands, by enabling consumers to use the BYOC platform regardless of whether or not the device is Acer-produced.
“All you need is one Acer product,” to use Acer’s BYOC platform, Chen said.
Chen joined Acer on January 1, replacing CEO J.T. Wang who resigned after a fiscal year in which the company posted an operating loss of $86.61 billion (around £54 billion, or AU$91.3 billion), and instituted a mandated executive pay cut of 30%. In Chen’s first 100 days, he said he has been able to “stabilize the company and get our machine…humming again.”
The new Acer is focused on the company’s two pillars: core strengths and pursuable opportunities. As Chen explains it, Acer needs to evolve from being a PC company that makes other products into a company focused on continuous consumer connectivity. “Acer is in the PC industry. Many of you know the PC [industry] is not a growing industry. So what do we do?” he asked rhetorically.
Chen said he is looking at the smartphone market in a very similar manner as one would have looked at the PC market twenty years ago when “IBM and a couple of so-called premium brands [were] at the top,” he said. “The smartphone industry today is deja vu all over again. We believe if we could apply our strength and the culture we inherited from Acer in the past 37 years to develop technology quickly, in a neat design, at an affordable price, we believe it would be an opportunity for Acer and our customers would appreciate it.”
At the event, Acer previewed the July limited edition launch of the Liquid Leap, a 17mm-thick smartband that will act as both a fitness tracker and a smartwatch, and will give consumers text and call notifications.
The company also previewed the Liquid Jade smartphone, which will be generally available in July as well, and it unveiled the Aspire Aspire Switch 10 and the world’s first Chromebook with an Intel Core i series processor.
Il 30 maggio 2018 veniva fatto pubblicare un articolo con questo tono “Acer’s BYOC progress proves the company is serious about the cloud“.
Il 30 settembre dello stesso anno il servizio verrà chiuso.
Leggiamo l’intero articolo per apprezzare la trasparenza (link – permalink)
Acer’s BYOC progress proves the company is serious about the cloud
Nick Rego published May 30, 2018
From taxis to tablets for seniors, Acer’s strategy is to connect and understand our everyday devices
Acer’s commitment to cloud services was a bold announcement for the company four years ago, and since then it’s been steadily working on offering robust cloud solutions for the B2B market.
It hasn’t been an easy journey, but the company is determined to offer the easiest and most reliable solutions to its various markets. At the helm is Maverick Shih, President, Smart BYOC Products, who is ensuring that Acer becomes a go-to solutions provider for cloud services. From enterprises to government needs, Shih predicts a huge need for responsive cloud solutions, and that’s exactly where he wants Acer to step in.
We sat down with Shih to find out how the BYOC business is shaping up, and how Acer is improving everything from taxi services to staying in touch with parents.
Acer started with cloud services a few years ago, and put you in charge of things at the company. How has the cloud arm of Acer been shaping up so far and what is your focus for this year?
We’ve been working hard on being a separate focus within the company. We’ve had great successes so far, as an example with grandPad in the US, for seniors staying in touch with their families. It’s being going really strong and people really love the device, so much so that we’re chasing parts for manufacturing on time.
There are things we’re working on now to connect existing devices that have been around for a while, but through our IoT platform. Once they’re connected, all the data that’s coming in can later be used to drive AI platforms.
We’ve been working in the computing industry for a very long time now, and even branching out to new technologies like AI within computing. The cloud and IoT are things we will continue to focus on at Acer, so I’m excited for the future.
Will the cloud services strike a chord for both consumer and enterprise markets or are you leaning more towards one than the other?
We are very B2B with providing IoT cloud services to other third parties. One of our values with BYOC is that the customer always owns their data. They have complete control over their data, even if they hire us to manage it for them. We can help customers with storage as well, so in our BYOC stack of services there is a security element to ensure that everything is stored securely and safely.
As an example, in Taiwan we provide cybersecurity services to banking and government sectors. We’re also helping to connect utilities across the nation, so for us cybersecurity is very important and a top priority for us. Antivirus is not cybersecurity, and that’s what people are realizing now.
Banking is a very exposed area because of all the transactions involved, while government security is also very important against cyberattacks. These are the two largest areas at the moment, but there will be more to come as IoT gets more and more connected.
Internet of Things is such a huge buzzword, but you’re taking it a step further with the Internet of Beings – care to elaborate?
‘Being’ comes from human beings, and we think it’s important that all these services are centered around humans, which is why we call it Internet of Beings. Rather than it just being another small sensor on a device, we want it to become so much more.
You also want to provide smart-city solutions such as transportation and healthcare – can you elaborate?
One of the biggest taxi dispatch systems in Taiwan was having a problem where customers were calling to book a taxi, but it was taking more than six minutes to get a taxi to their location. By that time the customer would probably just flag down a taxi from the street, even if they have a taxi reserved.
So we took historical data from taxis that were ordered and used our AI technology to predict certain areas and times where more taxis are needed. In this way when a customer calls, a taxi is able to arrive in half the time. For the drivers it also means that they’re getting more business, which is also very encouraging.
This is just one example of what we’ve been doing. It’s a navigation process for us – we discover things in phases and try things to see what works the best. There are for sure things that are coming, but it just needs time to warm up to the market.
Are you going to leverage your knowledge and experience as a hardware provider in order to more easily introduce your cloud offerings to the market?
For sure – when it comes to the future, AI, IoT, and cloud services all need a strong base. You can’t just rely on a two-year old startup to manage your important data and cloud services, so for us that underlying trust is there with our brand.
Where do you see BYOC making the most impact?
Firstly will be helping companies to make a digital transformation with both our PCs and cloud platform. The ecosystem is missing a few components, but we’re working with some key partners to make these happen. There’s a strong need for data scientists to help with this, but the people just aren’t there in the market.
Only companies who process a large volume of data such as Google and afford to do things in-house. Other companies can’t handle this sort of task, so we’re working with specialist institutes to train people to have these skills. We’re offering our services to them so they can learn data processing, AI, and other necessary skills.