I just came across The Economist’s debate on cloud computing. Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Division and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce outline their conflicting views on the future development of cloud computing. After a short scroll, I hold Benioff’s comments for clearly the more biased. I respect what Salesforce has achieved but Benioff’s views are still somewhat utopian. Elop on the other hand manages to deliver a much more realistic and less biased point of view. I am eager to see how Microsoft will realign or reshape their Azure strategy in general. I’m starting to think that some experts have prematurely underestimated Microsoft as the cloud losers.
All in all it’s great to follow these ongoing discussions. I’m especially interested in whether the outlooks I conceived in early 2009 (in my second bachelor’s thesis on cloud computing) will prove to be true in 1 or 2 years’ time. My personal opinion is that this technology is certainly not the “breakthrough” it is marketed to be. Rather, it’s a logical evolutionary step for virtualization combined with better utilization of existing computing capacities. Yet cloud services and cloud technology do make a lot of sense for a variety of business tasks and maybe even more technical tasks. But I guess I’m still skeptical because the cloud hype has to run its natural course first. Eventually, more mature solutions will settle in.
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