Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Cloudy Manifesto
When software companies get together and use a ten-dollar word like "Manifesto" it means that they want to be taken seriously. So it goes with the Open Cloud Manifesto.
Who are the dominant players in cloud computing? Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and, maybe, Yahoo. Are any of them supporting this manifesto? Nope. Who are the supporters? IBM, Sun, Cisco, SAP and a number of smaller companies. Why the disconnect? As Tim Bray puts it:Anyone remember OpenDoc?
Who are the dominant players in cloud computing? Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and, maybe, Yahoo. Are any of them supporting this manifesto? Nope. Who are the supporters? IBM, Sun, Cisco, SAP and a number of smaller companies. Why the disconnect? As Tim Bray puts it:
I've seen this movie before: There's a new area of technology, there's a dominant incumbent who got there first, and there's a bunch of other voices calling for standardization, being genially ignored by the incumbent.
It's perfectly reasonable to suspect the incumbent of wanting to protect their turf, and also to suspect the standards-promoters of simply wanting a piece of the action.
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