THE CLOUD:

Boosters, Critics, Winners ... and Losers

Presentation to

The friends of COBWEBby

@JamesWoudhuysen

February 2015

George Favaloro: he coined ‘Cloud

Computing’, at Compaq in 1996

Eric Schmidt’s New Digital Age!

INTERNET: ‘an online world that is not truly bound by

terrestrial laws… a lawless space, ungoverned and

ungovernable by design…

CLOUD: ‘only reinforces the permanence of information,

adding another layer of remote protection for users and

their information...

In post-conflict situations, ‘Truth- and-reconciliation

committees will feature a trove of digital records

In Libya, ‘many of the militia fighters were integrated

into the newly created army...’Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age, 2013

Cloudfinder general, USA: Gene L Dodaro

CLOUD COMPUTING

AdditionalOpportunities and Savings Need to Be Pursued

September 2014

GAO-14-753

United States Government Accountability Office

Report to Congressional Requesters

Boosters: the cloud is...

• Something that just brings magic with it

• Seamless•The solution to everything•An irrevocable trend and one Y ou Must Obey

Critics

‘It’s going to be horrendous’ – the Woz

‘With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You alreadysigned it away...

‘I want to feel that I own things. A lot of people feel,“Oh, everything is really on my computer”‚ but themore we transfer everything onto the web, onto thecloud, the less we’re going to have control overit...’

Steve Wozniak,Washington,August 2012

‘Your hard drive brims with capacity’ – Cory

Doctorow

‘It costs nothing to use (after you’ve paid for it

once, and leaving aside the electrical bill). It is

vastly faster than any wide-area network link.

Contrast with wireless bandwidth: there’s only

one RF spectrum, and you have to share it with

everyone within range of your device.

‘Increasing your demands on the wireless

spectrum comes at the expense of my use of

that same spectrum.’Cory Doctorow, February 2013

Giacomo Balla, Numbers in Love, 1920

Just a little hyperbole from Marc

‘Our greatest challenge is making

sense of that data. And we need a new

generation of tools to be able to

organise and view the data...

‘We don’t need more cloud.We don’t

need more mobile.We don’t need more

social. We need more data science.’

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff,Fortune, 22 January 2015

Critics vs the Cloud

Who controls your data?

Cost and speed vs local

alternatives

Data interpretation and visualisation

Winners

Agility: sense + respond in real-time

It makes senseto share

Author:

James Woudhuysen

Professor of Forecasting and Innovation

De Montfort University

October 2005

Author

James WoudhuysenProfessor of Forecasting and Innovation

De Montfort University

Spring 2012

Back on trackSupporting the development

of a 21st century rail network

A means of making yourself different

Winners

Firms that use the Cloud to be

•Agile

•A platform for the added value of human

brains and insight

A platform for differentiation

Losers

All those who fail to make a

balanced assessment of the

Cloud’s merits – and of what it

can’t do

One thing they’ll never automate

Thank you!

@JamesWoudhuysen

www.Woudhuysen.com