Nov 1st, 2008 |
I generally view a trend as nearing maturing when the Economist sits up and takes a notice. They now have a special on cloud computing:
As IT gets cloudier, the economics of the business will change
As you might expect from the Economist, they take a moderate view:
In essence, what [Cloud computing] does is take the idea of distributed computing a step farther. Still, it will add a couple of layers to the IT stack. One is made up of the cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google. The other is software that helps firms to turn their IT infrastructure into their own cloud, known as a “virtual operating system for data centres”.
The article is fairly well-rounded and covers expected impact on SaaS players, hardware providers and industry structure. Besides the Economist story, EC2 coming off beta and offering an SLA for its Linux cloud model, and also offering a Windows version, are signs of true critical mass.
All the more reason to vote for cloudworker as the new telecommuter! Incidentally, my neologism made the NY Times yesterday, and also featured in a piece in industry trade site SearchUnified Communications.
Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.
Kudos on having your neologism picked up by the NY Times! That said, I’m curious on the definition. How is ‘cloudworker’ different from remote worker, telecommuter, knowledge worker or information worker, for that matter? Is this a term that one would use to describe themselves or is this a term an IT professional would use?
Interestingly a pervasive trend within technology is to create language which reinvents or re-describes existing well understood topics.
Touching back, from a behavioral perspective, a knowledge worker is a knowledge worker regardless of where they sit. Be it in cubical or 30miles away in a home office. The backend enabling technologies are certainly different however most information/knowledge workers could simply careless (about the technology). At a high level most want to get their core job done in a location that’s comfy and cozy.
There’s no place like home…there’s no place like home…there’s no place like home.