He also predicts the demise of the PC.
"As long as someone accidentally backing a truck into a power cable in San Francisco can immediately take down a third of these bratty little Web 2.0 outfits, little of what Carr says is going to transpire anytime soon."
You can make the same argument for on-site power generation. That didn't keep companies from using the power grid.
"Oh, and good luck getting companies off Exchange Server."
This is actually a good point, for reasons of compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, etc. Corporations likely want tight control of email for legal reasons, at least for now. If that gets solved by an off-site email provider to the satisfaction of corporate attorneys, on-site Exchange installations won't last long, either.
Will it maintain backward compatibility with all the unmaintained proprietary software people use to run businesses? Probably not (Windows is very unhip and everyone uses Linux).
Weren't thin clients supposed to take over long ago?
I think everything he says will eventually happen, just not soon.
"You can make the same argument for on-site power generation. That didn't keep companies from using the power grid."
A major selling point of these stupid data centers is supposed to be their high uptime and resilience against power problems. What went down is a data center, and that killed dozens of hip Web 2.0 services. If all your computing stuff is in the cloud and a major part of the cloud goes down, you have no computing and you have absolutely no control over the situation, because after all, the data center never goes down. Oh well, you're doing what the pundits tell you to!
I'm fucking sick of how people on this site don't care that web applications often have shitty uptime.
lulz! Typical employees can't even keep their Windows systems free of spyware. Suddenly they're interested in "controlling the processing of information directly"?
And how is this cloud utility computing going to work? Web applications? A monster JavaScript hack is going to replace Excel? Not anytime soon, especially for hardcore users.
As long as someone accidentally backing a truck into a power cable in San Francisco can immediately take down a third of these bratty little Web 2.0 outfits, little of what Carr says is going to transpire anytime soon. (It doesn't matter, even if your quarterly report is due in 8 hours - this is WEB 2.0!!!)
Oh, and good luck getting companies off Exchange Server.