Rokjok777

Cloud Wars Are on the Horizon

Bill G famously said "things change less in two years than you think they will, and more in ten years than you think they will". I think cloud is one of those cases.
The idea is appealing and of course IT pros like it since they could shift all of their hardware-related issues to cloud companies. But the quality of the network, globally, is nowhere near being up to the task. I've just returned from Malaysia, a pretty advanced emerging market, and the idea of a major entreprise relying on cloud services is a bad joke.
The other skeleton in the closet is the complexity of rendering things just using a browser. We are used to real processing horsepower on desktop machines giving us very advanced user experiences. Substitute a browser-only approach: things get ugly, fast. Development gets really tricky; response times drive users crazy; and using ActiveX controls to run device drivers is a nightmare and a security problem waiting to happen.
So yes, cloud will happen. But it's way too early to make any financial bets on companies making money from it. Except possibly to short Salesforce...