

The Shape of the Cloud - astrec
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/10/27/Shape-of-the-Cloud

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iigs
_To me, the cloud-computing landscape feels like the Web search landscape in
1996. Back then, Everybody who’d thought about it had clued in that this was
going to be really interesting and useful. There had been a few offerings,
much better than nothing but not really hitting a sweet spot. [Disclosure: One
of them was me.] Then Altavista launched and it was clearly better than
anything else. Meanwhile, Larry and Sergey were at Stanford thinking about
transitive functions over the graph of Web hyperlinks._

Maybe. To me it feels more like commercial software development in the early
80s. There were a bunch of platforms (C64, PC, Apple II, etc), none of which
was a clear winner, software had to be written twice to work on two different
systems.

People talk about lock in, but seemingly mostly in the context of getting
their data back out when they're done. I'm particularly interested in watching
how the space commoditizes (hmm, the red bars tell me that's not a word). Over
and over we've seen markets converge on one or a small few standards -- I
think we're some distance from seeing that here. I think it's too early still
to put any guesses on how it might standardize yet.

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jhancock
I'm not sure if Tim's historical analogy is on target, time will tell. But his
rational prior to the analogy is the best short summary I've read so far.
O'Reilly's more lengthy version is also worth the read
[http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/web-20-and-cloud-
computing....](http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/web-20-and-cloud-
computing.html)

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liuliu
I do not think the barriers of cloud computing is such lower that grad school
students can do some crucial innovation. Though the comparison to 1996's
search engine is very interesting. As I am also doing some field work in cloud
storage, it is very insightful that amazon made the first move, but not the
most correct one.

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niels_olson
does anyone feel like you could mad libs version of this article and run it
every six months or so?

