
The Future of mobile is not about mobile (Video of Keynote at FOWA - London) - spif
http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/videos/stefan-fountain/
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iigs
A bit long, and a bit too much of an ad for his company (soocial). That said,
he said some thought provoking things about the term "the cloud" that changed
my opinion on it somewhat.

Prior to watching the video I sided with Larry Ellison of Oracle, saying that
"the cloud" is at best renaming something we already have/do and probably more
self-flagellating than anything else. In the video he contends (as many others
do) that "the cloud" is about pushing the commodity line up from electricity
or ISP service through the application layer (hosting services and browsers).
His contention is that this is a big win for everyone, including software
providers, because it's something you expect to have, just as electricity is,
so demand rises accordingly.

This casts Ellison's position in a different light for me, because as the
market currently exists they're the incumbent, and they arguably have the most
to lose by any change (they potentially have a lot to gain as well, but the
downsides, if mismanaged, are very direct and real). One argument about
commodities/utilities is that you very rarely have electricians or plumbers on
site at home, or even in a business of thousands -- it's a service that you
generally don't even keep on retainer, you call on an as-needed basis.
Oracle's database software is poorly placed here, a fact that's hard to argue
against if you've ever tried to install and perform basic DBA tasks on it.

Also, apologies for quoting "the cloud" every time. It's 2008 and I'm still
having a hard time using the word "blog" without quotes. Argh. This is going
to take some time. :/

~~~
spif
Shorter version is here:
[http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/videos/stefan...](http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/videos/stefan-
fountain/highlights)

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Angostura
I kept waiting for him to say something novel, but gave up after about 15
minutes. Clearly, I'm missing something.

------
edial
A very vivid presentation, definitely worth checking out

