Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Information overload ...

It may come as a surprise, to a few technology pundits, to discover that a company's web site, email, ERP and other systems don't tend to exist on employee laptops. The majority of such application tend to exist on servers.

This surprise might well turn into shock upon discovering that such a state of affairs exist within many large companies. Many of these services are also ubiquitous in an industry.

However, shock might well become bewilderment upon discovery that these computing silos often have poor utilisation rates and that there exists the opportunity to provide economies of scale. Centralised large computing providers could provide standard services more economically and without impacting the experience to the user.

However, the discovery that the real deal behind cloud computing is the componentisation of commodity like activities (resulting in an acceleration of innovative activity) might well cause a stroke.

Cloud computing is about the shift of common parts of the computing stack (from applications to infrastructure) to a service rather than a product based economy and it is not primarily about whether "users prefer office to be on their laptops".

I would always recommend researching a subject before talking about it and especially before publishing articles in papers and journals.