The Cloud in 10 Years: Will It Be a Major Force, Have the Same Visibility in the Next Decade?

Grazed from Wired. Author: Stephan Meyn.

To get a glimpse into the future of cloud computing, it’s useful to look for analogies from the past in computing. It has been 30 years since the birth of the IBM PC. Its beginnings were humble and acceptance was slow, but a few years later something very special happened that would make the computer as common as the telephone: the convergence of the introduction of Graphical User Interfaces and Object-Oriented Programming. Until the early 1980s, computers were the domain of technical enthusiasts, with little appeal to the masses. Even the advent of early GUIs didn’t help all that much. Then came OO.

But once these two technologies met, it turned out to be a match made in heaven. OO allowed programmers to eliminate much of the complexity of GUI programming, making it increasingly accessible to programmers to develop ever more powerful applications. That in turn made the PC accessible to the everyday user thanks to memes (desktop, folders, and files) that were easily comprehensible to non-programmers…

It was a seismic shift, but this revolution was actually more of an evolution. PCs did not replace the mainframe, but instead expanded the computing domain by making it accessible to many more users. And it spawned three killer apps that 30 years later still dominate our world: word processing, spreadsheets and email…

Read more from the source @ http://innovationinsights.wired.com/insights/2014/08/cloud-10-years-will-major-force-visibility-next-decade/