Future Imperfect
This post is going all geeky on you. There’s a mission and a method to my madness, and I mean madness in the most forward thinking way. After all, if we don’t have a vision or a dream, what makes up the color in our future?
First up is Fred Wilson’s presentation from a talk that he gave at Google. Note that even though these are just the slides, Wilson gives you a clear idea that there’s something disruptive going on.
Second up is a report from JD Lasica and the Aspen Institute entitled Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing (PDF, purchase). Lasica points out that the disruption is all about identity, personal empowerment, and benefits to society and commerce all around. From his report:
Excerpt: Why the Cloud Matters
According to Newsweek: “At the end of August [2008], as Hurricane Gustav threatened the coast of Texas, the Obama campaign called the Red Cross to say it would be routing donations to it via the Red Cross home page. Get your servers ready—our guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, whatever, the Red Cross responded. We’ve been through 9/11, Katrina, we can handle it. The surge of Obama dollars crashed the Red Cross website in less than 15 minutes.”
The New York-based tech start-up Animoto, which lets users create professional-quality, MTV-style videos using their own images and licensed music, was averaging 5,000 users a day until it suddenly received a burst of new users who discovered it through Facebook. Its traffic surged to 750,000 visitors over three days. The number of servers Animoto was running on jumped from 50 to 3,500 during that span of time. “It was just numbers we never imagined we would ever see,” chief technology officer Stevie Clifton told a Seattle newspaper. “It was fun and scary and pretty cool.” Thanks to AmazonWeb Services, Animoto’s servers did not crash, because Animoto does not have any servers. It outsources its computing power to Amazon.comand pays only for what it uses. The ten-employee company is now expanding. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos touts Animoto as the poster company for cloud computing.
The tales of the Red Cross and Animoto neatly sum up the contrast between the former economy and the emerging cloud economy. If the Internet economy is an apt descriptor of the changes taking place around us today, then the term cloud economy could justly be ascribed to the still larger global disruptions ahead. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has called this “the cloud computing age.”
Coaching moment: Sometimes people I talk with say that they feel like a lone wolf howling at the moon. Most of the time these people are visionaries or idealists that don’t have a common public voice. The crowd hasn’t discovered the conversation yet. Identity is one of those conversations. It’s a relatively small group talking about a subject that everyone will be impacted by, and that the future will be shaped by (one way or another).
If you’re one of the lone wolves, take heart. Keep up the good work. The more we tell the story, the better we get. The better the story becomes, the more people will want to hear it. The time is good to explore, discover, think, discuss, and practice telling the story. Not everyone is ready to hear it yet, which is ok. All things in time.
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