The rise of cloud computing raises a lot of legal issues, and one of the thorniest involves the variations in national laws governing the storage and use of personal and other information. Controls on data threaten, for instance, to prevent certain information from being stored in data centers outside a user’s home country, hence eroding some of the efficiencies promised by a global cloud.
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going–so far as I can tell–but it’s changing. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
There are two ways to look at Amazon.com: as a retailer, and as a software company that runs a retailing application. Both are accurate, and in combination they explain why Amazon, rather than a traditional computer company, has become the most successful early mover in supplying computing as a utility service. For Amazon, running a cloud computing service is core to its business in a way that it isn’t for, say, IBM, Sun or HP.
In a brief but illuminating video interview with Om Malik, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos underscores this point in describing the origins of Amazon Web Services. “Four years ago is when it started,” he says, “and we had enough complexity inside Amazon that we were finding we were spending too much time on fine-grained coordination between our network engineering groups and our applications programming groups. Basically what we decided to do is build a [set of APIs] between those two layers so that you could just do coarse-grained coordination between those two groups. Amazon is, you know, just a web-scale application.”
Oracle has enjoyed considerable success by rolling up the software side of the the now-mature client-server model of corporate computing. With its $13.9 billion acquisition of sluggish outsourcing giant EDS, Hewlett-Packard is playing the same game on the services side. It’s buying vast tracts of data-center space in which run the computers and other IT machinery that power the operations of lots of large companies and government agencies. The addition of EDS more than doubles the size of HP’s services business, giving it a scale closer to that of the leading IT outsourcing company, IBM.
A new study, released Tuesday by McKinsey & Company, reveals in some of the clearest terms yet the sea change that is under way in business software. The consulting firm surveyed more than 850 corporate software buyers, from firms of all sizes, and found that software-as-a-service is rapidly “becoming mainstream,” with three-quarters of software buyers saying they are “favorably disposed to adopting SaaS platforms” for software development and deployment. The rapidly growing embrace of Web applications is leading, says McKinsey, to a fierce competitive battle, between “traditional mega-vendors and the larger SaaS incumbents,” for the future of the enterprise software business.
As the Internet becomes our universal medium, it is reshaping what might be called the economics of culture. Because most common cultural goods consist of words, images, or sounds, which all can be expressed in digital form, they are becoming as cheap to reproduce and distribute as any other information product. Many of them are also becoming easier to create, thanks to the software and storage services provided through the Net and inexpensive production tools like camcorders, microphones, digital cameras and scanners. The flood of blogs, podcasts, video clips and MP3s, most available for free, testifies to the changed economics.
I’ve received a few more hints about the big cloud-computing initiative Microsoft may be about to announce, perhaps during the company’s Mix08 conference in Las Vegas this coming week. One of the cornerstones of the strategy, I’ve heard, will be an aggressive acceleration of the company’s investment in its data-center network. The construction program will be “totally over the top,” said a person briefed on the plan.
There are an estimated half of a billion people in the world who surf the Net every day yet don’t own a computer. They depend on the public PCs available in cybercafes, which in many cities and countries remain the centers of personal computing. Cloud computing is ideally suited to these so-called cybernomads, as it can provide them with, in essence, a computer to call their own–a virtual desktop, or “Webtop,” that exists entirely in an online data center and hence can be accessed from any PC. Cybernomads can use their password-protected Webtops to run applications, store data, and share files with others. Webtops can provide an attractive alternative to the cheap laptops, like OLPC’s XO and Intel’s Classmate, in helping close the digital divide. Virtual PCs are more energy efficient than real PCs, they don’t wear out or require physical maintenance, and they can often be provided free, through ad-supported or other subsidized programs.
Call it Gruntbook. As part of its long-term effort to pioneer “network-centric warfare,” the U.S. military has rolled out a social-networking system for soldiers in Iraq. Called the Tactical Ground Reporting System, or TIGR, the system was developed by DARPA, the same Defense Department agency that spearheaded the creation of the Internet 40 years ago.
You can get away with a three-letter initialism as a product name, but if you try to stretch it to five, you’re sunk. HD DVD? It never really had a chance, particularly when it was up against a snappy futuristic-sounding name like Blu-ray. If the Jetsons had decided to get a second dog to keep Astro company, they would have named it Blu-ray.
Can’t you picture Elroy throwing the happy pup some kind of electronic chew-toy gizmo?
Fetch, Blu-ray!
If over the last decade you’ve read any of the many books and articles promoting the Net as a means for forming self-regulating, super-democratic communities, you have no doubt come across glowing descriptions of eBay’s feedback system. By providing buyers and sellers with a simple means for rating one another, eBay has been able, we’ve been told, to avoid lots of rules and regulations and other top-down controls. The community, built on trust and fellow-feeling, essentially managed itself. Tom Friedman, in his book “The World Is Flat,” voiced the common opinion when he called eBay a “self-governing nation-state.” Nice story. Too bad it didn’t work out.
When Google adopted “don’t be evil” as the cornerstone of its corporate code of conduct, what it really meant was “don’t be Microsoft.” The company’s loathing for its neighbor to the north was on display again today in a remarkably contemptuous broadside launched against Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Yahoo by Google’s top lawyer, David Drummond. Drummond does not mince words. Microsoft’s “hostile bid,” he writes, is an attack on “the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.”
As GPS transceivers become common accessories in cars, the benefits have been manifold. Millions of us have been relieved of the nuisance of getting lost or, even worse, the shame of having to ask a passerby for directions. But, as with all popular technologies, those dashboard maps are having some unintended consequences. In many cases, the shortest route between two points turns out to run through once-quiet neighborhoods and formerly out-of-the-way hamlets.
The Internet arms race has begun. On Jan. 8, the Washington Post reports, George Bush signed a far-reaching executive order expanding the power of federal law enforcement and spy agencies to combat Internet attacks on government computer systems using both defensive and offensive measures.
We humans no longer have to struggle with just our own mind-body divide. Now, we also have to navigate the existential crises of the products we buy, which increasingly lead intellectual as well as physical lives. Descartes has arrived at the shopping mall.
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