Triumph of the Cloud Nerds - Web is the new PC
Author: Cloudipedia Editor
If you’d like to see where cloud computing is going, you simply look at the evolution of earlier computing platforms. In the 1996 documentary “Triumph of the Nerds”, Steve Jobs described his early vision to take the desktop to the masses: “It was very clear to me that while there were a bunch of hardware hobbyists that could assemble their own computers, or at least take our board and add the transformers for the power supply and the case the keyboard and go get, you know, et cetera, go get the rest of the stuff. For every one of those, there were a thousand people that couldn’t do that, but wanted to mess around with programming - software hobbyists.”
Web as the new preferred “platform-of-choice”
Interestingly, today’s cloud infrastructure is similar to the desktops of the ’80s in several respects. Although it ultimately benefits the ordinary end user, it’s mostly the techies that get excited about it and that continue to refine it. The result will be the same. Just as PCs were once seen as something “with potential” but nonetheless only used by a handful of “hobbyists” as Jobs puts it—or “geeks”, to not put so fine a point on it; cloud computing is seeing the same evolution. In the future, cloud toolkits and platforms will make the cloud as easy to use as today’s desktop computer; and will become as ordinary and accepted as the desktop or laptop PC.
So where did the concept of “cloud computing” come from? It goes all the way back to the origins of the Internet itself. The Internet was always seen in diagrams as a cloud, even before the term “cloud computing” came into use. The idea was that, as described by Google’s Kevin Marks, it “comes from the early days of the Internet where we drew the network as a cloud . . . we didn’t care where the messages went . . . the cloud hid it from us.” The internet therefore gave us the first cloud, which centered around networking. Later, data abstraction added another layer to it. Today, the cloud abstracts the entire environment: infrastructure, platforms, and data and applications.
If you look closely at the Web, it is doing ALL of the same things as yesterday’s PC… except without the box (thus the word “cloud”). Inasmuch as this may sound absurd to technologists, it’s an equally perplexing notion to consumers. Either way, we all should care because the implications are enormous.
What are those implications? Well, cloud computing represents the bigest technology platform war in about 30 years. The biggest platform war since the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates days that were dramatized in the cult classic “Triumph of the Nerds.” The next couple years will be interesting.
Posted in cloud computing