Social Media Hysteria
Yesterday, after the Amazon outage, I tweeted a comment highlighting the difficulties faced by AWS customers (applicable, in general, to all public cloud customers) when there is an outage. It was a tweet meant to highlight how desperate the situation becomes for AWS customers as well as AWS employees. I compared the situation after such [...]
Cloud Computing's Electricity Metaphor Has Outlived Its Usefulness?
Image via Wikipedia Nick Carr, in his book The Big Switch, used the electricity analogy to explain the nature of Cloud Computing. Initially, this comparison helped people get enthusiastic about cloud computing by connecting the idea with that of electric generation. However, I think this concept has outlived its utility and we need to go [...]
Keep your Executive Assistant happy if moving to the Cloud
Google held a small event in London late last month, at which senior executives from a wide range of organisations gathered to discuss the impact of the Cloud. Presenters included luminaries such as Marc Benioff, Werner Vogels, Geoffrey Moore and Nick Carr, as well as CIOs at the coalface in adopting various Cloud (mainly SaaS) [...]
Video: Nick Carr On The Evolution Of Clouds
Google organized an event for CIOs at Bloomsbury Hotel, London on Oct. 22nd. It was an attempt to impress upon the CIOs that Cloud Computing is real and it is going to be there for a long haul. They paraded some cloud luminaries including Nick Carr, Werner Vogels, etc.. Nick Carr gave a good presentation [...]
How Many Computers Does The World Really Need? There Are Two Answers.
Legendary IBM Chairman & CEO Thomas Watson declared in 1943: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. The fact the famous quote is likely incorrectly attributed to him is immaterial. 80 or years later the World may just prove him (or whoever said this) right. According to Microsoft research chief Rick [...]
Nick Carr Thinks Google Makes Us Stupid But Google Thinks We Are Just Unconscious
Image via CrunchBase Last summer, Nick Carr kickstarted a meme by asking Is Google Making Us Stupid? His argument is that Google by collecting and organizing all of the world’s information, mechanizes our intellect and makes us stupid. He argued that the distractions in the net scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration, increasing the [...]
Nick Carr Discusses Cloud Computing and the Economic Climate
Nick Carr’s 2008 book, The Big Switch, has been closely associated with the rise of Cloud Computing in the minds of many; especially in the wider business world where these ideas are yet to achieve the prevalence that we expect for them over the next few years. With the paperback edition of Carr’s book just [...]
Openness – It is not for a Cloudy Day
Image by dsearls via Flickr Recently, Nick Carr wrote an article in response to a blog post authored by a Google employee about Openness. He argues that Precisely so. We can (and will) have debates about the relative openness of Azure and AWS and Force.com and all the other "cloud platforms" that are available or [...]
Network Effects, Monopoly and Cloud Computing
There is a new debate brewing in the tech blogosphere about whether network effects play a role in the success of a cloud computing vendor or not. It all started with Hugh Macleod making an argument in his post that there is a potential for a single company to achieve monopoly in the cloud infrastructure [...]
