Journalists wrote about cloud computing more than 6,000 times in May. Why?
After all, the delivery of IT services across the Internet is more than a decade old. Hotmail is a cloud-based email service, PayPal a cloud-based payment service, and Salesforce.com a cloud-based CRM – and all of those companies were started in the ‘90s. So what’s new that has made cloud computing so popular in the last two years?
I think the answer is that three prerequisites, or enablers, of cloud computing have been progressing steadily over the past decade, and their combination is only now at an inflection point.
The first enabler was the ubiquity of high-speed Internet access. The percentages of offices with broadband, of airports and hotels with WiFi, and of smart phones with data capability have all grown steadily since the dot-com crash. The second enabler was the maturity of browser technology. Only in the last three years have the major browsers settled on standard implementations of the technologies required for rich, interactive user interfaces – most importantly the Document Object Model (DOM), but also xhtml, CSS, and JavaScript. The third enabler was the gradually increasing comfort end-users have with storing private or critical information on the web. Call this the Gmail effect: over the last decade, professionals became accustomed to using the web for email, then retailing, then personal banking, and finally conducting business.
If one supposes that improvement in those prerequisites has been more or less linear over the past 10 years, then their product – cloud readiness by businesses – would have increased not in a straight line, nor even like a parabola, but along a cubic curve. In other words, the trends combined to produce an inflection point in cloud readiness only recently.
At that inflection point, major vendors like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and (ahem) TrackVia entered the space, in turn driving those 6,000 press mentions. Okay – more of that coverage focused on those first three vendors than the last one. But check out our online database for business anyway!
