Alex Williams, this morning at ReadWriteWeb, pointed to the new cloud offering from Google as “an exciting development but it also illuminates the lock-in issue and why many an enterprise is reticent about adopting cloud computing.”

It’s definitely an exciting development in that it’s essentially the embodiment of the long awaited GDrive rumored to be released any minute now for the last five years. But Alex’s inference that it represents a prime example of vendor lock-in within the public cloud storage industry is, I think, a highly misplaced usage of the term.

I’ll try to illustrate Alex’s error by using an example a more broad base of people might be familiar with. I’ve spent a great deal of time, as most of you have, in the open source CMS world. I’ve worked with a variety of content management systems like Drupal, BuddyPress, WordPress, and Blogger. Almost all of these claim to be varying degrees of “Open,” ranging from open source to open standards. Similarly, the comment management systems that work with these blogs are mostly platform agnostic, at least when it comes to installation. Disqus, Echo, and Intense Debate all work on all the aforementioned services and platforms quite well, but if you’ve ever tried to switch your CMS, you’ve probably noticed the difficulty in such a move. Moving from Blogger to WordPress is a breeze.  What about from Drupal to Blogger? Not as much. 

Take my example when I moved rizzn.com from Blogger to WordPress.  I was able to get 10+ years of blog posts from Blogger to WordPress, and with a little finagling, even managed to keep most of the same URLs as I switched my CMS. Comment data was another story. Disqus allows you to export your comment data to a variety of services and formats, because they’re “Open” and ascribe to “DataPortability,” but the religion of Vendor Lock-in is alive and well in that company, and I dare you (to this day!) to find a way to get the XML file exported from Disqus to be imported into any other comment service or transfer along with the content to another CMS. Sure, I could write my own custom code to do the job, but I have things to do, and I can’t spend that sort of time transferring comments from one site location to another.

That’s The Concept Behind the “Stack Wars”

That’s the type of behavior the term Vendor Lock-in is meant to describe, whether you’re trying to move from an SAP-based ERP to an Oracle-Sun stack, or trying to migrate away from Cisco networking equipment into a Juniper stack. It’s exactly this type of behavior that John Furrier and Dave Vellante were referring to the last two weeks (at #EMCworld and #SAPphireNow) when they talked about the “Stack Wars” with Levi Strauss CIO Tom Peck.

Vendor Lock-in, though, I don’t think can be applied to the public storage world, be it cloud or otherwise. There’s existed a standard for transferring files between public cloud options since before the term “public cloud” existed – and we call them FTP and its cousin HTTP. If you have the ability to put files into the system, you have the ability to get them back out. Because there’s only a few public clouds out there in wide usage, the open and free libraries to get files in and out are plentiful, and a migration effort is as simple as switching out the libraries required to access these systems.

Google’s new storage option competes directly with Rackspace’s managed and unmanaged cloud storage options (CloudSites and CloudServers) as well as Amazon’s S3 services. All of these programs function on the same principles – you pay small amounts of money for storing the data and then small amounts of money when it’s accessed. If you don’t want it there anymore, you transfer it away. There are different idiosyncrasies if you want to access the data in more efficient ways than what is the obvious web standards, but by and large, they work how traditional storage options work.

Vendor Lock-in is a serious issue – as series as our long-standing debates in the social sphere about DataPortability and open and walled gardens. Is this new field of public cloud storage the rallying cry to get attention to this issue?  Not really.