Like a lot of people I've been eagerly following the conversation between Hugh Macleod, Tim O'Reilly and Nick Carr on the nature of Cloud Computing and the possibility the market can be dominated by some large vendors. The posts and the comments are fascinating and certainly thought provoking. Even some well known analysts like James Govenor and Stephen O'Grady of Redmonk have weighed in.
I realize there might be as much of a first mover advantage for commentators as there is for market entrants, but this does seem like a lot of traffic on a market that's really quite young.
That said, I'd like to pose two questions that came from following this topic.
First, does everyone assume that one cloud is pretty much like any other? I realize there's segmentation around IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, but even then, are these clouds really going to be mostly the same? I suspect how you answer this question will color your thoughts on the topic as a whole.
Second, on the economies of scale notion, at what point do diminishing returns kick in? Does anyone really know or are some of the really, really big data centers being built right now an experiment in finding out? I recall a while back that some very large semiconductor fabrication facilities were built and only after they were completed did they find out that the planned savings didn't pan out as intended.
As always, I'd love any thoughts that might be had.
