Laugh all you want at 'the cloud' - it'll be worth '$100bn by 2016' Some $100bn will be slurped up by public IT cloud services by 2016, according to the crystal-ball gazers at IDC. Spending is set to peak at $40bn this year but is forecast to expand more than 26 per cent on a compound annual growth basis over the next four years – five times faster than the total industry average. "The IT …
And, to be honest, the only people we actually LAUGH at are those that put their personal files or ultra-important business files ONLY on the cloud and then cry when their provider loses it all (or exposes it all via a hack or whatever).
The cloud is just a remote server from a 3rd party. Fancy virtualisation / failover / whatever technology with new names, but that's what it amounts to. There's nothing wrong with that. It's what you DO with it that makes people laugh at you.
Hell, I've seen some FANTASTIC uses of cloud - popular game gets huge amount of people flocking to it all of a sudden, ramp up some more virtual servers and they're handled. Steam's entire distribution network is really a "cloud". But in terms of laughter, it's only the poor fool who uploads all their music collection / every document they make / whatever to the cloud and then expect it to be somehow miraculously undeleteable, or the government department that uses a cheap Indian cloud provider and then are shocked that they've just broken 20 or more Data Protection rules not to mention lost their database because of a datacenter outage.
"Cloud" is a new name for an old concept. Nobody laughs at the concept, because that's what we've always had and used, but people might laugh at the name, its misuse, and people using it who don't even understand what it's supposed to mean.
...this is all meaningless. I mean there are new kinds of technology being developed, but most of the "Social Web" "Web2.0" stuff will probably be worthless in a few years.
Look around you, companies like AOL have (kinda) failed. Nobody would have thought that would be possible back in the late 1990s. Nobody knows if Google will still exist in 20 years. For all we know by 2016 Facebook could be sold off for a ridiculously low price.
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