When you use Google’s “free” services you give up a certain degree of control over the data you push and receive through those services. This is why you’ll see Microsoft take an opportunistic strike at Google with its well planned, multi-channel campaign called Scroogled. Very creative, essentially Microsoft took off their gloves and is now taking strong jabs at the methods Google uses to make revenue by utilizing your personal data. Your personal data is extremely valuable and when you use the internet you give up so much of that data by allowing websites like search engines, cloud e-mail accounts, and social networks to collect, compile, categorize, manipulate, code, and store your usage patterns and information you transact through those websites.

The Scroogled campaign is a smart one…Microsoft lost substantial market share to Google’s suite of cloud services and they want that market share back. Microsoft might be working on improving the logical reasons for switching to their services but this campaign leads in with emotional bait that essentially tells us that Google is unethical and that we deserve better from our cloud services provider.

The issue here is that it’s becoming easier and cheaper every year to create your own cloud-residing services. These cloud services that you create on your own Private Cloud will allow you to control your own data, strengthen your own online security posture, and remove corporate interests from the picture. This is kind of like the relationship between free file sharing services and the commercial interests that prefer that you buy those files…no matter what they do, industry associations like the RIAA still can’t stop folks from freely sharing files that would otherwise be sold commercially. The difference here, with Private Cloud services, is that it’s 100% legal to create your own Private Cloud services…so there are no legal barriers, only technological barriers. You don’t have to refer to Moore’s Law to realize how fast the internet and computing technology is becoming increasingly more affordable and easy to implement by folks with limited technical expertise…that is, you don’t need the resources of a multi-billion dollar corporation to help yourself to today’s newest technologies.

Coming soon are private social networks…where you only provide access to people who you want to have access…not billions of people across the globe. It will only be a matter of time before we start to see consumers using private cloud methodologies for their own online needs, from e-mail to search engines.

Any economist will tell you that there is no such thing as a “free lunch.” You might not have to pay a red cent for the lunch…but someone’s paying cash for that lunch, somehow, somewhere in the supply chain to get it to you at no direct cash cost. So you’d be a fool to think that Google, or any other provider, is offering you something for free because they’re good samaritans. If there wasn’t a way to profit off your data there wouldn’t be money to maintain expensive data centers, networks, staff, etc.