One hundred years ago, there was no electrical infrastructure. Edison and Tesla had not begun their battle over whether we should use AC or DC to distribute electricity, and lamps were still being fueled by the dwindling resources of the whaling industry. Railroads had just agreed to a standard-gauge track so that trains could cross from one line to another. There was no interstate highway system. For that matter, there were no mass-produced cars.
In the short time since, we have gone through successive stages of innovation followed by standardization and commoditization. In the utility space, each fueled an increasing availability of power to our homes and offices. We used to buy refrigerators and then go out and select the motor to run in it. Now we are ignorant of what’s in the box and where it comes from. Such is the way of industry.
IT is no different, with successive waves of innovation bringing us a standardized and commoditized offering. Computers used to be stand-alone and unique. My first job entailed getting computers of different makes to talk to each other. Largely thanks to the Microsoft monopoly, the hardware commoditized, which allowed the networks to standardize. Thanks to DARPA, we have the Internet, which gave the machines a way to use those networks to interconnect, pushing us past the tipping point to where we are approaching ubiquitous access to computing power. The tech bubble left us with gobs of dark fiber and comms capacity just waiting to be used (and driving down the cost of interconnection).
But IT is different from electrical, cable, and telephone utilities. IT can be anywhere, and the others are point-to-point, i.e., you need to know where the central office is. They are essentially N:1 connectivity, like a arms radiating from a central hub. The Internet means computing power, and by association the content you access can be anywhere, i.e., it is N:N connectivity, where the N in this case is in the billions. Hence the concept of the “Cloud.” more
