A Head In The Cloud

What will computing look like in 10 years?
You will basically have a body of information that you can invest a lot of time into customizing. There will be a lot of third parties that add value to your information, people who offer you services. Your information will be in a bank somewhere—an information bank—and people will be adding value to it. Whatever device you use, you will expect that device to be able to access that information in the way that you want as opposed to the way the device wants.

Are we essentially going back to that mainframe world?
It's a kind of a synthesis that goes on. It's the old Hegelian thing. You have thesis, antithesis and you have a synthesis. From the centralized but lousy user interfaces on mainframes, we went to the decentralized world of the PC where we've got pretty user interfaces but we have huge fragmentation of information all over the place. Now we will go to a common synthesis that puts the best of both together.

Is there a risk of a lock-in if companies start relying on a cloud provider?
There is going to be the classic tension between the interest of the user who wants things to be standardized, portable and to have choice and the interest of the provider who wants to have a very sticky relationship with the customer. And I'm sure that, just as before, the pendulum will swing one way or the other over time.

Who will run these clouds?
There will be a variety of companies who want to make a business of it. And we don't believe it will come down to two or three guys at the end. We think it will be hundreds of outfits who want to provide these services.

Will there be clouds based on vertical markets? Or will there be some ü ber -cloud that brings everything together?
I think there will be differentiation. For instance: on quality of service. Some people will be able to take on more liability and provide better quality of service. There will be people who will understand a certain industry's needs better than others. I don't think it's going to be a single giant cloud that provides a least-common-denominator service to the entire world.

© 2008