The forecast is cloudy
By Molly Flatt“According to Microsoft research chief Rick Rashid, around 20 per cent of all the servers sold around the world each year are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies – he named Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon.”
And so the FT Tech Blog throws us a pretty interesting statistic, and one that doesn’t surprise me at all. Coming on the heels of this Director.co.uk piece about the value of cloud computing, I think it’s pretty clear that the recession will provide the final push to drive cloud mainstream. Companies just won’t be able to justify throwing money at massive internal storage systems and unwieldy servers when systems such as Google Apps, Amazon S3 and Zoho offer an eminently scalable and dynamic alternative – and one which has the potential to spawn a whole new generation of leaner, meaner and more effective work apps.
It’s another step in the merging the way we play with the way we work, using social media which are increasingly mobile and geographically flexible. Whether we have our consumer, employee, or harrassed mum hat on, we’re social creatures – and we’re taking control of how and where we create and share.
