Real World Computing
Looking to the future
Some of the companies that create these online applications do it so they can sell the service to companies on a per-user, per-month basis, while others state they intend to make money from advertising to their clients. However, many make no statement at all as to their business plan, and one is left to wonder how they'll make enough money to stay in business.
Running an advertising-supported service may mean examining the content of your documents in order to target adverts at you, in just the same way Google's servers read your messages in your Gmail account in order to present you with "relevant" adverts. With terms and conditions running to many pages, and including clauses that say the company can change these terms at any time without telling you, I'd personally be very wary about entrusting any of my data to any of these services.
