Cloud Computing Smackdown

I enjoyed reading Thomas Claburn’s story yesterday from the Web 2.0 Summit.  It caused me to think a little bit about this topic.  (yes, scary.)

Some quotes:

“I think it’s fantastic that they’re coming in and saying that they’re going to have something someday.” 
– Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce, speaking about Microsoft’s announcements relating to Azure Services.

“It’s a great endorsement by Microsoft that this is the future.”
- Dave Girouard, General Manager, Google

“The Microsoft Azure announcement is a great effort by Ray [Ozzie] to turn an oil tanker.”
- Paul Maritz, CEO, VMWare.

Mr. Claburn noted that “With such sniping, you might think there’s a war on.  Indeed there is, for control of the cloud.”

I think he made some good points.  The article made me think that it may be a long time before the cloud computing market shakes out into any form that is well-formed sufficiently to be “standardized”. 

Individual Protocols, of course, can be understood and standardized, and maybe that’s all that we need to get started, but if too much attention is committed today, and then Microsoft comes in to change the game again, some level of change will again be required.

I guess that doesn’t mean that the investment was lost, or not worth the experience of struggling with these issues early.

It’s like SharePoint ISVs learning how to play in the cloud with BPOS, today, but understand that they are working in a relatively limited feature set, when compared with what will probably be available in future releases, as BPOS improves and moves forward.

It’s going to be a fun next 10 years!

Share this post :