Slashdot Mirror
Mr. Bezos Goes To Washington
theodp writes "TechFlash takes a look at Amazon's evolving government cloud strategy, reporting that the company is quietly building an operation in the D.C. area ('Amazon Government Solutions') as it aims to become a key technology provider to federal and state governments and the US military. According to Input, the federal government market for cloud services is projected to grow to $800 million by 2013, and the state and local cloud market is expected to reach $635 million by that year."
Larry Ellison used to spout off that PCs were ultimately doomed. That the Internet would allow for hosted services and remote computing power and our local computers would merely be thin clients hosting the view portion of the application.
Yet this concept never truly took off. Instead of personal computers getting lighter and thinner, they got bigger and more featureful. The exact opposite of Ellison's prognostications.
Businessweek had an article in 1996 describing the move we are seeing today to "cloud" services.
http://www.businessweek.com/1996/26/b34813.htm
And the ones who will reap the profits are still the server-side service providers. Netscape is gone, now there is Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Sun still lives on as part of Ellison's own network computing powerhouse Oracle. If someone could monetize a server-worthy version of Linux, there would be massive profits for that company as well.