Larry Dignan over at ZDNet has an interesting summary today of a skeptic's take on cloud computing, courtesy of Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay. This wins a link thanks to the handy chart showing the complete cloud stack, and mapping out who's who in this game:
Lindsay downplays cloud computing as a significant business trend, pointing out scant revenues for service providers such as Amazon, among other things.
What Lindsay misses, in my view, is the disruptive influence of cloud services in enabling cheap experimentation. We've used Amazon's S3 and EC2 services at Wired.com as a sketchpad, testing ideas without requiring major hardware or hosting investments. The economics are a game changer for start-ups and skunk works, so before we count the cloud out let's give it a bit more time to make some rain.
