Cloud Is Bigger Than the Internet

There, I said it. I wasn't the first--a couple of guys funded by Google speculated in March 2009 that cloud computing "could be" bigger than the Intertubes.

And I'm sure there are hundreds of you out there, if not more, who have voiced this opinion to colleagues, in a blog, or maybe in a corporate memo that's been ignored completely.

Someone else said that cloud will be bigger than we can imagine. This is not true and not possible. Nothing created by humans is bigger than we can imagine, because we imagined it.

The universe is bigger than we can imagine, to be sure. I'm not even sure if the universe is finite, infinite, or one of those mathematical infinities in which some infinities are much larger than others (think irrational numbers vs. rational numbers).

Even the manner in which we humans misuse new technology shouldn't be bigger than we imagine anymore, given what we've learned from The Manhattan Project.

I certainly don't want to sound glib along the lines of "The Internet changes everything." I was never sure what that was supposed to mean. The Internet didn't change the laws of physics, didn't change past historical facts, and certainly hasn't changed fundamental human nature just yet.

Plus, sounding glib in a blog would make a travesty of all the deep, considered thinking that goes on in the blogosphere.

So, back to the statement: Cloud is Bigger Than the Internet and Web.

Why?

Because as the much-smarter-than-me Nicholas Carr (among others) have pointed out, Cloud will turn IT power into a measured, utilitarian commodity. "Yes, IT does matter" was, of course, the rhetorical answer to Carr's provocative article "Does IT Matter?" a few years back. It matters in the way electricity matters.

IT does not matter in the water matters, because we can live without electricity but we can't live without water. So we'll limit the utility analogy to electricity.

Electricity, once it was standardized on a national basis, captured, and distributed more-or-less safely, has indeed transformed society for the better.

Electricity spawned innovation. For the good--safe and reliable lighting, furnaces, numerous labor-saving devices, and radio. For the bad, television. For the in-between, air-conditioning and cellphone/blackberry/iPod chargers.

Cloud will spawn similar innovation. Companies will no longer have to devote such a large percentage of their effort to keeping HAL in line.

Hand those hassles over to someone who can make money providing reliable computing power, and now you're freer, ie you have more resources, to think of all the good things you should think about.

Penicillin, Post-It Notes, and Viagra were all semi-accidental discoveriers. The researchers weren't necessarily looking for these market-busting products when they were monkeying around in their labs.

The Web was introduced in similar fashion. But additionally, legions of very smart people had been discussing hypertext and hyperlinks for years before the Web came into being. Its realization certainly kicked off a new era of dot-com innovation. But the dot-com crash illustrated that the Web itself didn't really give us a new paradigm--it just made communications a lot more convenient, while also spawning endless amounts of trivial chattering.

And its inventor will be the first to admit he stands on the shoulders of many, and he didn't expect his clever invention to crystallize with the Internet and provide the greatest IT story of the past two decades.

The Internet itself was a government operation. No more need to be said about whether it was one of history's great inventions.

Ironically, it was designed in a hugely decentralized fashion to protect against something that never happened (a large-scale nuclear attack), yet which has proven limited in its ability to handle what has happened (magnitudes upon magnitudes of increased network traffic).

Do we have a "father" (or mother) of Cloud Computing? Probably not. The topic has been discussed for awhile, and seems to represent a convergence of recent thought about software provisioning, server consolidation, frustration over long deployment times, and the usual drone of budgetary concerns.

But as Cloud is adopted, it will be historically clear that we have finally caught up to where electricity was in the late 19th century. To be sure, there will be standardization issues and disputes, failures, mass confusion (never underestimate the power of FUD), and buyer's remorse along the way.

But just as "the current wars" in Edison's time over whether to adopt AC or DC seem quaint and amusing to us today, the initial cloud-v-cloud skirmishes over the next several years will seem quaint a century from now.

It's a done deal. Cloud is the way of the future. For the first time since computing resources started to be managed by customers in the 1950s, Cloud places this responsibility back on the shoulders of utility providers.

Sure, pesky things such as application development, deployment strategy, capacity planning (which will become much more sophisticated once people realize they can micromanage this), and knowing exactly what you are trying to do with your IT will remain in the hands of the business.

And it is here where Cloud becomes most profound. Electricity doesn't enable a company to do anything. Computing resources do.

Farming out your IT functionality means you can now focus on making all the great brains in your company--and brains are not computers, never have been, never will be--spend their time inventing the future, rather than hassling with problems of the present.