I have been spending time looking at cloud computing and differing cloud offerings from Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Vision of computing as a utility delivered over the internet has been around for a long time. For those who remember HP’s e-services, I spent time spinning how to deliver our existing printer networking solutions as part of our e-services ecosystem…
This article is not specifically about cloud computing technology, but about the insights it has spawned… However, for anyone that is interested, my cloud computing solution comparison notes are here; I also recommend Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing.
As I studied and researched cloud computing solutions from Google, Amazon and Microsoft, I came to realize how much of corporate personality spills into our technological creations, you could say we create in our image… One could argue, this is all about branding. And, as a Buddhist principle states that all views are empty of inherent existence, I would not argue: views rather depend on who is looking, and when, and for what purpose. However, I see branding as a conscious and explicit activity, while our process of creation is unconscious representative of our true-selves.
As I was reading Ackoff’s The Art of Problem Solving: Accompanied by Ackoff’s Fables
- The scientific: the pursuit of truth;
- The political-economic: the pursuit of power and plenty;
- The ethical-moral: the pursuit of goodness and virtue;
- The aesthetic: the pursuit of beauty;
Other than my obvious oversimplification, here is what I noticed as I was pondering over my notes…
Amazon has put together perhaps the most comprehensive and mature set of services. As their solutions are easy to comprehend and most portable from the development and deployment perspective, they should appeal to the IT-minded folks. Initially what has started as an infrastructure (IaaS) approach is now progressing towards platform solution (PaaS). Leveraging their core competency of operational excellence, Amazon has given the control to its customers, including the management of data and application deployment locations around the world.
With all that, Amazon is utilizing the pay-as-you-go service. Though this is certainly appealing, looking through the pricing terms felt like I would be nickeled and dimed even IF I really paid attention to my application design… (Note that the need to design-for-the-cloud applies to all cloud computing technologies in general.) With that, I place Amazon on the pursuit of the power and plenty column.
With the motto of do no evil, Google automatically moves to the category of pursuing goodness and virtue. Google’s AppEngine approach is in complete support of this pursuit, working to deliver cloud computing vision to anybody with as little effort as possible. Using a platform approach (PaaS), Google delivers automatic self-healing, self-scaling applications. All one has to do is to develop within the Google’s framework, follow their best practices, and everything else will be handled auto-magically.
Following Google’s tradition of giving away large quotas, AppEngine is also free up to a certain level of usage per-day. In addition, the developers can set daily budgets where Google Checkout is available. Pricing as well as the development environment would attract startups and Open Source community, which would continue to give more goodness back to the Google’s ecosystem. However, the customers’ lack of control over the infrastructure can challenge and raise further concerns for privacy and security in the cloud (see Forrester’s Interactive Data Protection Heat Map.)
In typical Microsoft fashion, the Windows Azure platform has something for everyone, including a flat-rate pricing structure. Designed as a platform approach (PaaS) with the possibility to provide infrastructure control (IaaS) in the future, Azure is a hybrid-cloud focus bridging enterprise and the cloud. Windows Azure also introduces a different development approach to cloud computing with the concept of Web roles and Worker roles to support auto-scaling via software. In order to encourage adoption and lure developers, Azure supports whatever programming language you want to use, from .NET to Java to Python.
Though one may question, it feels like Microsoft is in the pursuit of truth with what seems like constant drive to redo/rewrite/re-architect/re-invent, while solving everyone’s problems and converting them to their platform. Borrowing from Karl Marx’s argument, are they the opiate of the people?
If Apple was in the ring, and there are rumors of future Apple cloud computing services, I would classify them as the pursuit of beauty. Just think, the most beautiful, completely controlled cloud-based AppStore that brings the elegance of Apple products to the clouds.
“In the process of developing an accurate assessment of who you actually are, you need to appreciate the disparity between how you appear to your own mind and how you indeed exist.”
–Dalai Lama
As I mentioned earlier, I am oversimplifying… However, every aspect of what we create (packing, documentation, web site design, technology philosophy, …) reflects on our personality and attracts customers accordingly. In reality, we don’t stop there, as businesses also attract and hire people like themselves. Which creates the cycle of similarity: similar products, similar feature sets, similar customers, similar thinking, similar mistakes, … No wonder many established firms struggle with innovation!
With that said, I believe this process, this behavior is normal. It is human nature. Given that the process of change is hard, instead we can seek to better understand the world that we operate in and design accordingly. Recently I read an article in the Building Design Strategy: Using Design to Achieve Key Business Objectives
Innovation is one thing; success in the marketplace, quite another. Alonzo Canada, Pete Mortensen, and Dev Patnaik offer a framework in which design becomes the channel for uniting these two realities. Identifying five clusters of users – innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards – and numerous hands-on examples, this trio of authors advocates tailoring designs to the priorities of each group.
Understanding the technology adoption and diffusion process is critical for every entrepreneur. Cloud computing takes this further in the sense that, it extends beyond immediate customers to those customers’ customers for its adoption. Using a methodology like this to analyze technology adoption early on in the development process can bring balance to our natural human tendencies for developing products for ourselves. For cloud computing, thought process might go something like this:
- endorse (cater to innovators) Focused mainly on communicating the benefits and advantages of a given technology, cloud computing already passed this stage. Just check out Apps.Gov!
- curate (cater to early adopters) Focused on the early adopters, this stage is like targeted, 1:1 marketing that emphasizes key desirable benefits, functionality and return on investment for that early adopter. I would say cloud computing is at this stage, where every cloud computing vendor is marketing their differentiation to attract customers. The specific features currently includes the ease of building self-scaling applications or introducing tools and services for automatic scalability, and hybrid-cloud approach of bridging private and public clouds.
- integrate (cater to early majority) This stage is focused on attracting mainstream users, who are looking for solutions that work without compromises. What does this mean for cloud computing?! With sites like Apps.Gov, many end users who are late adopters, laggers and mainstreams will be adopting cloud computing. With that, the cloud computing technology feature set needs to satisfy both the developers and their end-customers. This includes improvement in the areas of security, privacy, governance (ability to set policies and monitor), performance and SLAs (Service Level Agreements), along with end user specific requirements, such as simplifying synchronization on and off the cloud, ease of content access across devices and platforms, reliability, trust, and of course performance.
- economize (cater to late majority) In the technology adoption curve, this stage is all about cost-reduction and commoditization. Recently Amazon launched EC2 Spot Instances, where customers can bid for the unused computing capacity and have access to resources as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price. Just think, global CloudExchange! To enable this level of ubiquity, we need cloud standards to drive interoperability and interconnectedness between clouds at a global level.
- play (cater to laggards) Laggars lag everyone in the adoption curve… The authors recommend making the familiar unfamiliar in order to appeal to laggards, where the motivation is not about technology. Similar to the VoIP’s entrance into the home as a bundled package with cable for voice data, cloud computing could shape into services and products that could appeal to laggards, such as TiVo-on-the-clouds.
- refresh (cater to new markets) Once cloud computing reaches its vision of computing as a basic utility delivered over the internet, what is next? How could the cloud computing vendors refresh and open up new markets? Maybe Amazon should start the Computing Affiliate Program to enable individuals to feed computing resources into the grid, just like solar into a power grid to add extra capacity.
As Drucker indicated, innovation is an effect in economy and society; it is a change in behavior of customers, in how they work and produce something (Innovation Process: 3 Things You Can Count On.) Using frameworks such as technology diffusion process and designing strategies to drive technology adoption, we can gain the needed insight and understanding to accelerate and enable the cloud as a globally ubiquitous computing utility delivered over the internet.
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