Cloud Mini-Series Part 1: The Transformative Potential of Cloud Computing

Grazed from ProjectDisco.org. Author: Matthias Langenegger.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that innovation is an inherently uncertain business. Its disruptive potential depends to a large degree on the social and economic context into which it is born. Groundbreaking inventions remain unsuccessful because no market has developed yet or because people simply don’t see the value. “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months.

People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night”, film mogul Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century Fox famously said in 1946. At the time, 8000 U.S. households had a TV set. By 1960, that number had climbed to 45.7 million. Also, whereas the potential of disruptive innovations may not be apparent at first, its negative effects, e.g. copyright infringement, are immediately visible and can go against powerful, established interests. Economists call this the ‘innovation asymmetry.’…

Other inventions become successful for uses that are different from what they were originally designed for. One such example is the smartphone, branded initially as a status toy for the urban elites, which has become the entry point to the Internet for billions of people in the developing world. The same may be true for cloud computing…

Read more from the source @ http://www.project-disco.org/competition/032614-cloud-mini-series-part-1-the-transformative-potential-of-cloud-computing/

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