Google Atmosphere: Disrupt or be disrupted, says guru Nicholas Carr

“With the PC, everyone got their own computer; with Cloud Computing, everyone gets their own data centre.” That was the rationalisation of Cloud Computing offered by Nicholas Carr, technology guru and author of The Big Switch as he kicked off Google's Atmosphere event in London.

Carr argued that while Cloud Computing may only now be entering the mainstream, the basic ideas underpinning it have been around for centuries. “The Cloud may be new but it does have precedents,” he noted. “It used to be called utility computing. We've seen the promise of Cloud Computing come about every decade since then. But it's now possible. If you wanted to tap into Cloud Computing before, you needed to build your own grid.

“But now we're moving from the World Wide Web with its static pages to a World Wide Computer – like a massive centralised Cloud. In the consumer world they've made the move already and now the business world is following the trend. Innovation and investment is all going into Cloud Computing. Everything is improving at a rapid pace.”

But it's a case of plus ca change... “The criteria for technology selection has been very similar across the years – it's been about maximising profitability and flexibility. Some things that just don't change,” noted Carr.

Power Trip

“If you look backwards to around 1850, you have Burden's Well which generated power. Burden built the most powerful waterwheel in the world and became the main supplier of horse shoes to the Union army,” he explained. “But by 1920 this great engineeering achievement had been allowed to collapse and was left to rust. The ironworks itself hadn't gone out of business, but the financial assumptions about power generation had changed. You didn't have to go out and buy your own power stations because there was now a more efficient model of supplying the resources that all companies relied on. That seems standard now, but in 1900 the shift still felt radical and a dangerous leap forward. Between 1910 and 1930 there was a massive shift.

“With Cloud Computing, the same thing is happening to IT. IT is as important to business today as power was 100 years ago. It is vital as a business resource. IT is a platform that you install and then build applications on top of. If you can find a way to centralise the supply of general purpose technologies, then you can save enormous amounts of money.

“Back in the 1960s the old corporate data centre was very impersonal. Individual workers or managers couldn't put to the power of the computers to their own use as they were isolated from them. By 1990, the complexity of the mainframe had burt out in to PCs and we saw extended use of computers for more and more purposes. It's the mirror image of the old mainframe era. There's a PC on every desk in every office.

“But it's still inefficient. Companies need to have dedicated servers. They need to build overcapacity into their servers and systems. IT labour costs are are among the biggest corporate costs, almost 70%. We're finally coming to a new era of IT where we can free up some of the capital. If you could out what every company is investing in, but not providing it with differentation from the competition, then you could drive down the total cost of IT. “

He concluded that the industry is moving into an era of considerable distruption and left his audience with a simple statement: “It's better to be a disruptor than to be disrupted!”