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signiicant, if not revolutionary, development. But electricity's sublime
allure wore off when people got used to universal lighting, especially when
the promised end to crime on the streets did not pan out. The sublime
became banal. But the genuine revolutionary power of electricity awaited
its withdrawal into the woodwork of banality. It was not until electrical
generation was organized into utilities and sent out to power industrial and
household applications (yesterday's apps) that one could safely conclude
that electriication was a principal participant in an economic and social
transformation. From powering automobile assembly lines to turning on
vacuum cleaners, electricity's many applications were not terribly sublime,
but certainly were transformative (Nye 1990). Indeed, some economists
argue that electriication, including centralized power generation and near
universal distribution, has been the most signiicant technological force
for economic growth in the modern era (Gordon 2000).
Cloud computing is moving from the sublime stage of ininite promises
to what may amount to a similar banality. In this respect, the cloud is a
gathering of utilities, certainly not the same as the electrical-power genera-
tors that enabled a leap in the industrial revolution, but not so different
that it is inappropriate to consider a similar process at work. The sublime
cloud is entering a banal phase where there is less focus on it as a discrete
entity and more on the transformative applications that it is enabling.
As one analyst puts it, “In the mid 19th Century, centralised generation
allowed electricity to be provided as a utility, meaning that consumers only
had to pay for what they used. Consumption could be scaled up or down
to meet demand without the need for capital expenditure. A century and
a half on, this is precisely the emancipating effect that cloud computing
is now having on the enterprise. Organizations no longer need to build,
maintain and renew cumbersome IT infrastructure in order to consume
as much, or as little computing resource as they need” (John 2013).
Cloud computing builds on its predecessors, but there are suficiently
signiicant differences that mark its departure from earlier models. It is use-
ful to consider some of these differences, beginning with the extraordinary
growth in the sheer size and scale of cloud facilities. It is no overstatement
to argue that cloud centers require a major stretch in our conceptual vision
to begin to understand their enormity. Consider the plans for the largest
data center (in cost, size, and processing power) now under construction.
In September 2012 China's major social-networking irm Baidu, a Chinese
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