When I first started as a journalist, the database wars were about to break out. These conflicts were a blood-soaked battlefield of marketing, PR hype, downright lies and just plain down and dirty childish behaviour on the part of grown men who should have known better.
Editor's Letter - All in a name
Posted by admin in on Tue, 15/09/2009 - 10:19
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The good thing about standards is there are so many of them to choose from. But what's the balance between standardisation and innovation? 
Cloud Computing Does Not Equal Re-Platforming
Why is everyone obsessed with the IT infrastructure aspects of cloud computing? Simply re-platforming or re-purposing badly-designed on-premise computing apps as cloud or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps is pointless.
What we can do today, is use cloud computing as the opportunity to crush business-as-usual IT. That means applying user experience design, interaction design and simple Web development thinking to create a simpler IT to better align to a simpler set of processes.
When Macromedia first promoted the concept of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) - before being acquired by Adobe - and Tim O'Reilly produced a fantastic piece of thought leadership called Web 2.0 and 'the architecture of participation' - the important things came to the fore - user experience, adoption and the replacement of people-based services with platform-based services. SaaS is totally valued on renewals. Renewals = user adoption and user adoption = user experience. So, it's design that matters - not the underlying IT infrastructure.
Cloud computing = Internet computing = computing. Soon, all major IT vendors will have their cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) out there - and who cares if it's Force.com, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, Wipro w-SaaS (Oracle stack), Amazon Web Services (plus Elastra), so on and so forth?
Cloud computing is all about what we have termed RIAs and Web 2.0 in previous waves of hype - user experience and the ability to extend or transform people-based services with platform-based services and empowering business users and consumers in social apps - 'the architecture of participation'.