Why monopolies and commoditization would pollute the cloud

Graze from GigaOM. Author: Mark Thiele.

There’s a common assumption that the Cloud’s destiny is to be a public utility. Mark Thiele, of data center operator Switch, argues that would kill competition and innovation, and that IT can be a better option. One of the prevailing assumptions around the cloud computing market is that it will drive towards an über-simplified delivery model that is similar to a utility. Further, this utility model will largely remove the potential for differentiation by most vendors and will lead to a race to the bottom from a pricing perspective.

There is ample evidence commoditization is occurring, and we could point to almost any area of IT to see it, from servers, PCs, virtualization, storage, networking, and so on. However, what is often lost in the obvious is that it’s not that simple…

IT commoditization vs cars

It’s true that with a modern server and chip combination you could likely solve almost any specific workload demand of a modern application. The inherent risk though is that there’s always someone out there looking to make a better rat trap, and the market continues to show that there is real demand for differentiation – consider the viability of both ARM and Intel chips for use with different job types…

Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/2012/11/17/why-monopolies-and-commoditization-would-pollute-the-cloud/