Reply to: A lesson for those who think the cloud is great

[NickFitz]

CompuServe is dead I think.

CompuServe lingers on as an ISP, a minor division of AOL. Its sole remaining offering rejoices in the name of CompuServe 2000.

How are the mighty fallen

[VectraMan]

And today I wonder what %age of code runs on either the JVM or a .NET Framework? It's going to be fairly substantial.

Only on the server, and there's a lot more desktops than there are servers. Java as it was intended to be used was a total flop; few people ever use Java anything on the desktop (Android excepted), and not much .NET either. That was a few years into my career, so my first real experience of a revolution in the industry that turned out to be hot air and not the last. You have to admit, when it comes to buzzwords "The Cloud" is a pretty great one, perhaps the greatest anyone has ever come up with, worthy of a Nobel Prize in Marketing surely. Which leads to the inevitable conclusion that it's just something everybody wants to be seen to be doing whether they know what it is or not.

But maybe I've become a bit cynical. Maybe I should get back to doing Web 2.0, whatever that is.

[Sysman]

Indeed. Remind me how Netscape, Dreamweaver, Shockwave, Flash, Real Player, ICQ, AOL and Compuserve are doing again?

tomtomagain addressed Netscape and RealPlayer.

Dreamweaver, Shockwave and Flash belong to Adobe who are still with us (spit!).

AOL

In 2000, AOL purchased Time Warner, the deal structured as a merger under the name AOL Time Warner. The merger was not fruitful and on May 28, 2009, Time Warner announced it would spin off AOL into a separate public company. The spinoff occurred on December 9, 2009, ending the eight-year relationship between the two companies.

Since then, AOL has begun to substantially change its business model reinventing itself as a brand company under the guidance of CEO Tim Armstrong, creating and acquiring a range of content properties. Major acquisitions include the purchase of technology news blog TechCrunch in September 2010, and on February 7, 2011, the purchase of The Huffington Post. Other AOL brands include Moviefone, Engadget, Stylelist, MapQuest and Cambio.

ICQ

In April 2010, AOL sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies for $187.5 million.

CompuServe is dead I think.

[Sysman]

For example: How many companies run change management? Have CM systems in place, run change boards? Lots. But how many companies would list "Change Management" as a core reason for why they exist? None of them.

However they all have CM systems, with the their own business processes, servers, software licenses and people to feed and water the infrastructure .... Why wouldn't a rational companies sign up to a Change Management system delivered as a service by an organisation that specialised in it?

Yep. Payroll went that way years ago, fortunately.

The Register had a webcast a few weeks ago, called something like "Break the customisation habit". I didn't watch it all but one thing I did catch was an example about invoice matching. They reckoned that there are probably 4 or 5 main ways of doing this, If the package you go for offers another 4 or 5 options, and you still want an 11th way, it's highly likely that the 11th method was the result of some long forgotten office politics and you really don't need it.

[tomtomagain]

That must have been about when the Java hype started. Java meant all software would compile to a common bytecode that could be run on any kind of device, including cheap as chips dumb terminals

And today I wonder what %age of code runs on either the JVM or a .NET Framework? It's going to be fairly substantial.

Of course there will always be exceptions to the rule. Some apps will need the power/flexibility offered by C++. Can't imagine writing SQL Server in Java. Hell there's still people out there coding in COBOL and FORTRAN.

And yes, there will be an awful lot of hype, and a big push by the consultancies and vendors to move companies onto the cloud solutions whether they are ready for it or not. And then probably high profile failures. And probably a backlash.

But that doesn't mean it's a flawed model.

[tomtomagain]

Do you think legal documents, which can potentially be accessed by some site administrator in Nob End, Nebraska, are going to be allowed?

So you think some sort of encryption solution is in order? What %age of documents *must* be located within a geographical boundary? It's going to be fairly small compared to the overall size of the problem.

Regional data centres are the obvious answer. That's part of the reason why Azure has such a global footprint. For example their new China DC. A Quick look at the Azure list shows that they have deployed to 12 regions. So If I don't want my documents leaving Europe I can simply deploy to the Western Europe region.

Indeed. Remind me how Netscape, Dreamweaver, Shockwave, Flash, Real Player, ICQ, AOL and Compuserve are doing again?

Well the guys who formed Netscape went onto become billionaires. Flash is ubiquitous, RealNetworks ( maker of Real Player ) bought a company called Slingo for $15M last year ... so they must be doing OK.

Amazon? You didn't mention them.

Plenty of companies in the internet boom failed. We all know that. But the internet didn't end with the dot-com crash.

Plenty of cloud companies may fail ... doesn't mean the model is wrong.

[VectraMan]

I don't see cloud as a threat. It's a massive opportunity. This is 1995 all over again.

That must have been about when the Java hype started. Java meant all software would compile to a common bytecode that could be run on any kind of device, including cheap as chips dumb terminals, sweeping away the dominance of Intel and Microsoft and turning us Visual C++ programmers into unemployable dinosoars.

Strangely enough, nearly 20 years later and I'm writing desktop software in Visual C++ on Windows.

It's just hype. Lots of people get rich jumping on the bandwagon, then when it fails to live up to the promise, they get rich putting things back the way it used to be. Good for IT contractors in the short term, but you have to wonder if sooner or later ordinary people will realise how much they've been ripped off.

[Snake Plissken]

Someone who knows how to use a forum? Option was there, so I used it.

(Although, what you really should have said is "Snake Plissken? I heard you were dead.")

[suityou01]

Hang on. Who's this Plissken chap? 3 posts and he's got an avatar already. I smell something fishy and it's not mudskipper.

[Snake Plissken]

Yes but the guys building the on-prem are also the guys building the off-prem.

And they are poring far more resources into cloud than they are with their on-prem versions of their products.

Microsoft are desperate for it to work. They've lost control of the smartphone/tablet market place. Windows as a client is likely to plateau at best. So they've got to go "all-in" on the cloud and become the defacto standard for running the services/websites that support apps.

Give it a few more years and it will catch up.

Yes, they are desperate for it to work. Like they were with Vista, Windows Phone, Zune, Kin, Surface and all those other game changing bits and pieces. Certain things cannot work. What to do about data going cross-border is a huge problem for the cloud. Do you think legal documents, which can potentially be accessed by some site administrator in Nob End, Nebraska, are going to be allowed?

This is 1995 all over again.

Indeed. Remind me how Netscape, Dreamweaver, Shockwave, Flash, Real Player, ICQ, AOL and Compuserve are doing again?

[tomtomagain]

And it is a long, long way from matching the on-premises equivalent in terms of functionality. .

Yes but the guys building the on-prem are also the guys building the off-prem.

And they are poring far more resources into cloud than they are with their on-prem versions of their products.

Microsoft are desperate for it to work. They've lost control of the smartphone/tablet market place. Windows as a client is likely to plateau at best. So they've got to go "all-in" on the cloud and become the defacto standard for running the services/websites that support apps.

Give it a few more years and it will catch up.

[tomtomagain]

But is it just the computing industry going round the same old circle: move everything to the server, move everything to the desktop, move everything to the server...

In sense, yes it is the old centralise-decentralise cycle. But this time the centralisation is on a massive scale and spanning thousands of organisations.

Each time the cycle turns a load of skills are made redundant, but a load more are created.

I don't see cloud as a threat. It's a massive opportunity. This is 1995 all over again.

For example: How many companies run change management? Have CM systems in place, run change boards? Lots. But how many companies would list "Change Management" as a core reason for why they exist? None of them.

However they all have CM systems, with the their own business processes, servers, software licenses and people to feed and water the infrastructure .... Why wouldn't a rational companies sign up to a Change Management system delivered as a service by an organisation that specialised in it?

And you can say that about almost all business processes that are not core to a specific organisation from accounting to project management. From Room Booking to Risk Management, from flight scheduling to file sharing.

I truly believe that we are at the cusp on the next big wave of IT change and that it is going to have a transformational effect on companies, internal IT departments and outsourcing body shops. And that it will be far greater than the changes we have seen over the last 10 years.

[Snake Plissken]

Essentially I have access to the same quality infrastructure ( or better ) than a FTSE 100 company ..... on a pay-as-you-go basis.

And if you haven't done so already. Sign-up for a Office 365 trial. For a few pounds a month it gives you, email, document sharing, instant messaging, file sharing and the office suite of applications. Again this is what 90% of people working in companies use.

And it is a long, long way from matching the on-premises equivalent in terms of functionality. Running Office 365 in the browser is an immense technical achievement - I like O365/SharePoint Online myself - but some of us still remember entire websites running in Flash and whatever happened to that...

Migrating companies to the cloud is surely going to become a big area of IT in the next few years.

I tell you who it is a big area for right now. Courier companies.

Because reliably transferring several TB of data can only be done by copying it all onto disks and sending it to the data centre by FedEx. That is, of course, assuming the data centre is in the country. If not, then the whole thing is moot anyway.

[tomtomagain]

I work in software.

I work in providing an answer to a business problem.

[tomtomagain]

What do you think those cloud platforms run on? white fluffy nothingness?

Actually if you look at the Microsoft cloud services you will see that they offer a "Compute" option.

There is no operating system.

The OS is history. It is an irrelevant abstraction layer and will be consigned to the dustbin of history.