Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
14
The Future:
Inter-Cloud, Etc.
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
- Alan Kay, computer scientist
The future is, in some respects, already here. Smartphones. Tablet computers. eReaders.
And the Cloud. This latter item is the current hot area of innovation: the sharing of otherwise
expensive computer capacity by diverse enterprises via the Internet in a "pay-as-you-go"
utility model. The business of the cloud is ever expanding - in fact expanding exponentially.
"... cloud computing is seeping into IT organizations and companies, often without any 'offi-
cial' approval or strategy, but with the undeniable momentum of a locomotive," writes Bern-
ard Golden, CEO of the consulting firm HyperStatus. " ... I firmly believe that we are on the
cusp of more change in IT than we have seen throughout its history, and those of us working
in the field have the enviable opportunity to be immersed in this transformation."
"I can only describe this now as a 'wow' moment," says Google's Eric Schmidt. "For me
this is the beginning of the real revolution in information ... Fifty years ago people in Amer-
ica were getting very excited by the conversion from black and white television to color
television. And computing was about building computers that had 1 megabyte, and that was
the size of a small room ... Doubling every 18 months is roughly a factor of 10 in five years.
In 10 years that's a factor of 100. In 25 years it's roughly a factor of 100,000. So when you
go back and you look at things 15 years or 10 years ago, understand that we were operating
in the context of 1,000 times less computation, thinking, networking, data analysis - we just
couldn't do it. We couldn't do the maps. We couldn't do the searches. We couldn't physically
do it. You couldn't get enough hardware. You couldn't get enough power, whereas now it is
trivial. So 50 years from now, people will think of us the way we think of the conversion
from black and white to color television. They will think: 'Why couldn't they do these ex-
traordinary things?'"
Schmidt continues: "When I grew up it was basically about enterprises - IT. Today com-
puter science is really about consumers and information. The rise of Google, the rise of
Facebook, the rise of Apple, I think are proof that there is a place for computer science as
something that solves problems that people face every day. There was only one company
that saw that a decade before anybody else and that company is Apple. If you look even
through the nineties - Sun, Microsoft, Novell, Cisco - they were fundamentally infrastruc-
ture companies based around corporations. That is where the money was. There was almost
no consumer use with the exception of Apple in people's daily lives. The big shift was over
10-15 years and it came with the development of the web. The easiest way to think about it
