Читать книгу Standing on the Sun - Christopher Meyer - Страница 13

Cloud computing gets its name from the fact that the computing power that firms rely on to operate needn't be on the ground at their own facilities. It can be “out there” somewhere, accessed via the Internet and purchased on demand from vendors like HP and Amazon.

If this were just outsourcing to take advantage of scale and specialization it would hardly be a new story for capitalism. Two benefits of cloud computing are more subtle. First, it lowers the barriers to innovation. If you have a new, information-based business model, to have to set up an IT infrastructure to prepare for customer number one is a big burden. To be able to buy computing power economically “by the sip” removes it. Before electric utilities, every company needed its own source of power. After they arrived, companies could use electric equipment without that investment. In 1982, when Xerox invented Ethernet, it had print ads showing a jack in the wall labeled “Information Outlet,” illustrating that someday you'd plug in (how quaint!) to a network and get all the information power you needed. Now it's happening.

The second benefit cloud computing brings is illustrated by Salesforce.com, one of the first apps to run in the cloud. Its experience shows how the cloud can bring true Web 2.0 value to apps; the many companies who use its sales management tools not only pay for the privilege, their usage helps to extend and improve the software's capabilities. Salesforce.com learns from everyone and makes that learning available to all. In general, shared information systems not only cost less than a population of proprietary systems, they encode more knowledge, and learn faster. This continuous, cloud-based learning takes us a long way from the architectures installed in the 1990s by big systems integrators, whose strategic mantra was “design, build, operate.” When the firms for which they used to deliver their walled-garden solutions opt for the cloud instead, few are able to gain a proprietary advantage through IT, but all benefit from a more rapid diffusion of innovation.

We'll return to this theme—the creation of platforms for continuous learning—in chapter 8, when we look at firm-level implications of capitalism's evolution. For now, let's move on to another technology with transformative power.