Summary
Like the credit crunch, you probably can't escape Cloud Computing.
Analysis
It seems that only alliterative terms like Credit Crunch or Cloud Computing can permeate our information overloaded Blackberry crazed minds.
Cloud Computing has certainly come to the fore. It's now possible to launch a company and use Amazon's services to provide a scalable solution that can survive those freak events like a facebook crowdstorm.
What's really interesting about this is that the big volume purchasers are Google, Amazon and Microsoft, who are either building out distribution networks or colossal datacenters. Even though they serve Billions of people, they still have "downtime" which like any commodity, can be sold by the bit, byte or cpu second.
So the cloudsters can create a market for these services. And it's really elegant and easy to understand and purchase: I can ramp my consumption up or down when and how I need it. Just like electricity.
For those CIOs who need to make this easy to relay to the rest of the board this is a compelling proposition (even more so if you're a startup and you don't know how your facebook application will run).
In a number of ways Larry's right:
Larry's right 1 - This isn't really anything new. It's a mix of Software as a Service and RightSourcing. But the vision and depth of execution of skills of the big Cloud players mean that they can provide a good solution that becomes more and more compelling as the promise of broadband and high speed mobile internet start to really deliver. So probably the biggest IT market for hardware, databases, middleware etc will be cloud computing, especially now that the Credit Crunch stops companies getting access to money...
Larry's right 2 - IT is a fashion industry. This is funny but obvious. And Larry's done a lot of the styling and trend setting in the past...
But Larry's also wrong - Data and Trust are the critical issues here. If the Cloudsters can make us trust them (and let's face it most people trust Google) then they can make this work in a way that's never been seen before. So this is more than the emperor's new clothes.
All things being equal, Larry should win on both sides as a supplier to the cloudsters and as a supplier to the data rich, control heavy organisations.
So like the Credit Crunch, this comes down to who do I trust?
