Working Together to Deliver the Cloud If you had any notion of not taking the cloud seriously for your business, your assumptions will certainly be challenged this year. This week alone has seen two significant developments that have boosted the visibility (if not the viability) of the cloud. First, there was Microsoft’s purchase of Internet telephony company Skype for $8.5 billion. There is a lot of speculation on whether this was a good business move for Microsoft, but regardless of how it turns out, it’s clear that Microsoft is betting big on the cloud as platform instead of Windows exclusively.
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The Real Pioneers of the Cloud Long ago, in the early 1990s, the business landscape was rife with what were then known as “dumb terminals.” These didn’t last forever: in just a few years, the consumer-driven market–assisted by a publicly available Internet and a commoditized PC ecosystem–managed to completely change the business IT landscape. Now, it seems, were are about to witness such a consumer-driven change again. Only this time, it won’t be the machines themselves that will be changing, but rather the software that runs on them. The change that is upon business IT is, of course, the cloud.
