Nicholas Carr – renowned author and thinker presents a great lecture on how the world has always changed, and is still changing. And how companies have always been afraid of change, yet their eventual adoption actually causes the masses to also make that adoption.
He uses examples of early power generation – where every manufacturer needed to run their own power plant. I think a more recent example is who creates content on the web, and how it is created. Just a decade ago it took a lot of smart people and a lot of money to publish to the web. Today it takes just an email. Publishing for the masses. Power for the masses.
This shift continues in how and where that data is hosted. It is no longer a tape drive on your PC that you back up to, or floppies that you copy data to. It really isn’t even the apps you load anymore. All of that is shifting – to the cloud. To the centralized power and publishing systems that are the modern “real time” web. And in time, this will be as trusted and expected as your local power outlet is. But it won’t take decades. It won’t even take years.
So this video is interesting to anyone that wonders why cloud computing matters, if it is just a fad, and how it fundamentally changes our world as much as the power grid has.
My employer actually launched a website and campaign about this just this past week. NoMoreServers.com is a site designed to get people thinking about why they are still running their own data centers. NoMoreServers is the corporate site that explains why it is important to you.
But I think it is pretty simple. Just like with power plants this is all about economies of scale. It is cheaper to pay by the hour than build for the boom. And that’s the key takeaway.
Rob La Gesse
Director of Customer Development
Rackspace Hosting
210-845-4440
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To answer the question in the title: The product that is provided by a refinery or a powerplant is a commodity that flows without losing its quality. Despite all the hype (examplified in this article) computing is still evidently not so homogeneous and commoditized. Indeed, all the Cloud vendors-to-be think about it as a way to lockin customers to their platforms.
Until computing becomes uniform like grid electricity or regular gasoline, companies will need to produce their own computing from their own serverbanks.
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