Cloud computing has its ‘Jevons Moment’

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons published “The Coal Question,” a book with a prosaic title that contained profound implications. Jevons set out to establish the size of England’s coal reserves, a critical question for industrial and naval power. During his research, he stumbled upon a curious paradox: As coal use became more efficient due to the advent of better quality steam engines, coal consumption rose rather than fell.

On the face it, this seems counter-intuitive. Improved efficiency leads to greater productivity which should lead to a resource savings. In fact, however, it meant just the opposite: As coal power got cheaper, people found more and more things to do with it. In the end, people consumed so much more coal at the lower price that the total amount spent on coal rose rather than fell. This phenomenon came to be labelled the “Jevons Paradox.”…

Computing is, of course, a premier example of this paradox. Despite the enormously lower cost of computers that’s occurred over the years due to Moore’s Law, total spending on computing has steadily risen. The past few years have been an exception to this regular progression – most of the server companies have seen essentially flat revenues, meaning that shipments failed to increase enough to offset the lower cost of processing. Boiled down, this means that enterprises haven’t been installing enough servers to grow the market…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio.com/article/2934733/cloud-computing/cloud-computing-has-its-jevons-moment.html