Has the WebOS Finally Arrived?

SphereOfInfluence writes "Dion Hinchcliffe over on ZDNet declared in a new post that the Web OS has finally arrived and that businesses and IT departments must adjust to the fact that everything's starting to move to the cloud. He cites John Hagel's so-called big business shifts of the 21st century and claims cloud computing, crowdsourcing, open APIs, Software-as-a-Service are the future of the workplace. He goes on to present a compelling visual model of the Web OS circa 2009 and examples to back up some of the statements."

Comments

Wait a minute.

[girlintraining]

Weren't we supposed to be all using thin clients right now in our flying cars, sucking the fat electrons straight from the coax at gigabit speeds by now? Now comes the latest proclaimation: We're going Carebears mode. Everyone into the clouds! Tenderheart's not going to be happy about this. I sense a big carebear stare coming for the Cloud-Mongers.

Re:Wait a minute.

[Philip K Dickhead]

Get Your Neuromancer On!

Maximum dystopian computing panopticon nightmare event horizon now imminent.

Please do nothing. We already know who you are and what you are doing. Should your innocence be established, the department will notify your surviving beneficiaries.

Re:Wait a minute.

[Hognoxious]

It's just another person predicting a paradigm shift that just won't happen due to inertia and unperceived limitations.

We just need to use a mashup of service enabled architectures to provide a seamlessly semantic experience.

If that doesn't work, then depolarize the bogotronic flux.

Re:Wait a minute.

[Atrox666]

..and it will all be linux on the desktop and will come with a free copy of Duke Nukem forever.

Re:Wait a minute.

[turbidostato]

"would have been great, except for the incorrect spelling of synergy."

So what? I never write down "synergy": it's a yellow star with some chrome rays coming out of it on a shiny most convincing powerpoint presentation.

Now, you are not being a team guy and clearly lack the vision needed to push forward for best market opportunities. No wonder you are a minion instead of a buzzword-compliant pointy haired boss like me.

Flashing lights and the death of crap IT

[MosesJones]

There is a phrase about IT

"We don't understand the hardware, we don't understand the software... but we can SEE the flashing lights"

This has led to a whole load of crap IT dedicated to neither hard-core hardware or to hard-core software, its the land of the PHB and its the land of the powerpoint. What surprises me about clouds however is that its often the hard-core folks who are scared of the cloud, they bitch about security and latency but really its because they fear it will make them less important.

It doesn't.

What clouds do is hugely commoditise infrastructure and (in the case of SaaS) those massive package implementations that customise to death a package that would have worked much better without all that consultancy "help".

The people who should fear clouds are the ones who lived off customising packages that didn't need it and who revel in a world of powerpoints and meetings because what SaaS and clouds do is shift the buying of crap boring IT into the hands of the business and then leave the business with the real questions of how to deliver the stuff that actually matters... the hard-core software and genuinely high performing infrastructure.

So don't think of clouds and SaaS as a threat... think of them as kicking the PHB and his expensive package customising consultants in the nuts.

Re:Flashing lights and the death of crap IT

[Anonymous Coward]

The "people who should fear clouds" are the people whose network connection is not 100% (and I don't mean 99.999999999999%) reliable.

And let's not forget that all your data is now in the hands of somebody else, who is almost certainly subject to the USAPATRIOT Act.

Re:Flashing lights and the death of crap IT

[Simon (S2)]

The people who should fear clouds ...

The people who should fear clouds are the people who want their data in their own hands, and don't trust third parties to handle it for then. It's that easy, and it's what will make SaaS fail.
We write SaaS, and almost all our customers ask us where we store the data, and if it we don't guarantee them it is in the country they are from they back off. And we write software for small firms only. Bigger clients want the software and the data stored in their own datacenter. They will not trust the "cloud" for that (and I wouldn't either). Not in the near future at least.

Re:Flashing lights and the death of crap IT

[SerpentMage]

In 1953 when IBM introduced the first computer, who made it work? Ah yes a team of programmers who customized...

When UNIX was first introduced who made things work for your business? Customizations...

When...

Want to see the future? Look at IBM... They have been around over a hundred years, while all of the other companies have disappeared. Look at the latest balance sheets of IBM, cash rich cow! IBM is a "serious playa". And what do they make their money off? Services and customization.

My point is that IBM is a company that adapts to the times. They build what the client wants. And the clients wants customizations. Sure IBM is on the cloud computing bandwagon, no reason for them to not be. After all more customization money for them. After all, who would not want a "private cloud", which is sort of contradictory, no?

The real money will be in the ones who know how to customize the cloud... Oh wait IBM, yes?

Re:Flashing lights and the death of crap IT

[Youngbull]

The people who should fear clouds ...

The people who should fear clouds are the people who want their data in their own hands, and don't trust third parties to handle it for then. It's that easy, and it's what will make SaaS fail. We write SaaS, and almost all our customers ask us where we store the data, and if it we don't guarantee them it is in the country they are from they back off. And we write software for small firms only. Bigger clients want the software and the data stored in their own datacenter. They will not trust the "cloud" for that (and I wouldn't either). Not in the near future at least.

I agree, and to be quite honest I think that cloud computing for private people will make some fiz and then leave quietly, too many people are one of three categories: "dont get it", "don't want it" and "don't care too much to get it".

Re:Flashing lights and the death of crap IT

[vlm]

They're turning their business over to the mercy of the cloud provider, and should it go down, the entire business may go with it.

Don't forget massive asymmetry problems. At a past job I helped "support" outsourced email for small businesses. Basically, the same thing as gmail but more expensive, yet not expensive enough to drive them away to gmail, in retrospect a fairly pointless line of business.

In one memorable unhappy situation, a customers email access from China, in a very email centric line of business, was worth "thousands of dollars per day of revenue" to them, and it was down, and they were very unhappy. They were worth "approx fifty cents per day of revenue" to us. Guess what happened due to that massive asymmetry? I think they eventually went out of business.

Re:Flashing lights and the death of crap IT

[dkf]

The Cloud represents problems especially where some countries and or companies have strong data protection laws.

It doesn't actually. I can and do get my computation and storage (from Amazon as it happens) located in countries where such laws hold quite easily enough (I pay a small premium - about 10% last time I looked - but I don't mind) and I know that there are other companies that resell this (with the location guarantee) as higher-level services. Now, if your prospective provider won't offer you the same level of service, I suggest you don't use them. Maybe you should also tell them why you're not going to trade with them; it might encourage them to take your concerns seriously if they know why they're not getting your trade.

Re:Flashing lights and the death of crap IT

[benjamindees]

Consultants don't give two shits about the "right" solution because the "right" solution is the most expensive one they can get a signature on. The lack of trust in their permanent employees has ironically led to them being bled dry by people who don't give a shit about the company... They're only there to install or maintain a thing now, in and out in a day.

Personally, I spent years trying to be a consultant who implemented the "right" solutions, all the while telling everyone who would listen that I could do a better job and would be better off making half as much money as a permanent employee with budgetary control. It got me absolutely nowhere.

Businesses don't want the "right" solutions. They don't want more stable and longer-lasting hardware and software if it comes with fewer bells and whistles. They don't want to pay for security. Their accountants won't cede an inch of control over purchasing decisions. And they fall for even the most obvious marketing bullshit. Most businesses will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to automate IT instead of letting IT save them hundreds of thousands of dollars by automating the rest of their business.

I have had people with literally zero IT knowledge tell me that they want to do everything by themselves, and then ask me how to do it. If you were a consultant, what would your response to this be?

Re:Flashing lights and the death of crap IT

[cetialphav]

After all, who would not want a "private cloud", which is sort of contradictory, no?

A "private cloud" makes no sense at all in a 50-100 person company. But when a company has tens of thousands of employees all over the world in dozens of different markets (e.g. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Cisco), they make a lot of sense. Departments often need temporary computing services, but have no choice but to buy a server to handle it. The server then goes to waste when the temporary job was done. When a company is large, it is difficult to coordinate the use of computational resources and this leads to inefficiencies.

I worked for a company that would create installers for the software for dozens of different languages. Each one of these installers would need to be tested at release time (about every 6 months). There was a dedicated machine that had all the relevant software to do this testing. This machine would get used for a week or two every six months which is a complete waste. A cloud environment would allow the server to exist as an image and then you would instantiate the image on whatever free machine happened to be in the cloud.

Looking back on my career, there are many times when I would have loved to be able to go to an internal web page, request a machine, upload a preconfigured virtualized image and had a departmental server up and running with no bureaucratic headaches. If I decided I was done with the server, I could just release it and the hardware would no longer be wasted and I would know that I could restore it at any time with a few clicks because the image would still be around.

Re:Flashing lights and the death of crap IT

[turbidostato]

"The thing is, you're not their parents."

Of course not. The example was just there in order to show that there are situations where the honest curse of action is to say "no".

"Your job is to facilitate what they do, not to do what you think is right, you don't generate any revenue, they do."

Not exactly. CIO's job -and even mid management's on a not so large company, is to look forward for the best for the company as is everybody else's in that ranges. And regarding revenue, that's a tough question. On the extreme only direct sellers gerenate revenue, not the case of a, i.e. CEO; and revenue is not all and everything, even if we only consider direct economic implications; operation and capital expenses are other very important elements on that equation.

"but in the end, while you might be the custodian, it's their data"

And then again who is "they"? high management? sales? A company is like a ship and being an employee, company's data is mine/not mine as much as is "Joe's from marketing".

"and you've got to do what they ask you to do wherever possible."

Not at all. My knowledge and responsibility is not that of the sales director; I don't go to sales to tell them how to sell because it's neither my duty nor my knowledge field; they don't come to me to tell how to govern IT because it's neither their job nor their knowledge field. Instead we work *together* to find the best path and tools to reach our strategy goals coupling all our strengths and abilities in that commonal effort.

"Being a dick and thinking you have the right to control what they do with their data is probably one of the reasons you don't get asked until the end in the first place."

That might be the case. Or it might be that they see data and tools as "their" data and "their" tools instead of our data and our tools. Or it migth be that because "they get the revenue" they see themselves as the all and everything in the company and as such they are pretty capable of completly "driving the boat" by themselves so they need no help from anyone else in the company except to do as they say.

"the role of IT is to make the business work better"

Absolutly true and then even more: being managing information an strategic asset of any modern company, IT is in the position of not only "make the bussiness work better" but even open new more profitable ways of doing bussiness within the company. But then, it is not IT the only which has the role to make the bussiness work better; that's the role of everyone else too (and that's against your notion of "I've seen more than my share of absolutely idiotic [requests]": it's their duty to know their bussiness as *not* to ask for idiotic requests as it's our duty not to let them pass through just to avoid confrontation).

"Anything you do which doesn't result in improvements for the business is waste"

As it is waste anything coming from any other corner of the company which doesn't result in such improvements (your "idiotic requests"). We all share that load.

slow news day?

[Anonymous Coward]

what ever happened to articles about tech that actually existed instead of what might happen in the next 3-4 years?

Head out.

[captnbmoore]

Someone needs to get their head out there ass before putting it in the clouds.

Backend mining

[NoYob]

When I read these Cloud Computing articles, I have these thoughts of writing a program that mines the data of all those companies that put their financials and other documents up there. Then use that data for: insider trading, marketing things to them, competitive advantages, and a bunch of thing that can be gained with confidential and insider information.

I think I'm a frustrated crook or security consultant.

Re:Backend mining

[nurb432]

If you encrypt it, data mining isnt a concern.

Re:Backend mining

[Sebilrazen]

I think I'm a frustrated crook or security consultant.

No, you're just fat lazy virgin slashdot poster.

No, they've posted before, click their username.

ZzzS are the slippery slope for webBS adoption

[xigxag]

Assimilating all of that Web 3.0 content led me to strategically develop a fully horizontal organizational orientation. I immediately shifted paradigms and commenced "cloud computing" for about 15 minutes, dynamically visualizing an innovative brave new world.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I feel a rapid fluctuation in my supply chain.

Some issues with "the cloud"

[davidwr]

Beware the perils of outsourcing.

If you are using a 3rd party to host corporate data, make sure:

* it meets all legal and regulatory requirements you must meet, guarenteed
* it has performance and uptime you need, guaranteed
* it is responsible for break-ins that are beyond your reasonable control, even if they are beyond its reasonable control. If you can't get a guarantee, pick another vendor or buy an insurance policy to cover you from lawsuits if customer data is compromised
* you can keep backup copies of corporate data in a meaningful format, in case the vendor goes belly up. "In a meaningful format" typically means a published format, but it could be a proprietary format which is shared by many vendors. Open format is many times better than proprietary.

Depending on your needs and size, it may literally be cheaper to pay an outside vendor to "clone" their infrastructure at your shop and train your IT dept. how to use it, so you can keep everything under your control. If, for example, regulatory rules prevent you from shipping your data to Google, you could hire them to build a mini Google server farm inside your firewall and have it index your data and offer "yourbrandhere-Google-powered" web-based "office" applications.

Another option is to use in-house or, if you prefer, outsourced virtual servers which you control access to.

Finally, there's the default option of "keep doing it they way you are doing it now." That option should never be off the table until a better option presents itself.

Diskless workstations at last?

[PingXao]

I have been working for over 20 years with various people who proclaim the dawn of the Era Of The Diskless Workstation is upon us. Cloud computing seems to be another instance of this class. I predict it's going to NOT be the "next big thing". The next big bubble of bullshit is more like it.

techno-buzzword salad

[elnyka]

That article was an example of techno-buzzword mental masturbation.

USAPATRIOT Act? Who sez I'm Ameriken?

[davidwr]

And let's not forget that all your data is now in the hands of somebody else, who is almost certainly subject to laws in their country that give the local government unfettered access to all your company jewels.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Can you say "idiotsourcing"??

[raddan]

I think "crowdsourcing" is so popular because we have a business culture that wants stuff NOW without having to think about how to actually get it. In some limited cases (e.g., wikipedia) where there is lots of expertise out there but artificial barriers in place to prevent the spread of that knowledge (e.g., publishers), this model works well because there is a "network effect" with something like Wikipedia. But as you say, it's not a universally-applicable thing, and regardless, someone, somewhere has to do the work.

As far as I can tell, the MBAs are being fed this crap in school. We (as in people I work with, but not me) recently hired (and fired) one of these people, and she literally spoke in pure buzztalk. Attempts to get her to clarify what she meant resulted in more buzzwords and circular logic. She even plagiarized a technical explanation of mine (verbatim) on her blog once, and when we called her out on it (by asking her to clarify what she... er, I said), it was more crap. Good riddance.

The diagram makes me want to hurl. It's like a buzzword flower or something.

Where I live... In a city of 30k people

[joocemann]

... the Internet is not available at high enough speeds for cloud computing to reflect anything close to using software on my home computer.

That doesn't mean I can't wait for it if its something that we're all moving to anyway; I'm just trying to bring up the obvious fact that there is lag in web apps and for some of us it might be a bit harder or longer process than others.

I'm ready to pay the $6/household that the major ISPs said it would cost to double bandwidth. I'm ready to pay it several times over. Is anybody listening?

Reverse the Polarity

[furbearntrout]

If that doesn't work try running it through the main deflector array.

Saas = Software as a SUBSCRIPTION

[macraig]

Do I need to repeat the rest of the explanation? We've been having this tug-of-war over software subscriptions for almost 15 years now. Call it "the cloud" or any of the other rebranding attempts from the past, but it's all had the same goal: making you pay more for the software you use.

What we should fear is no longer having any control at all over the software we use AND having to pay every month/day/hour/minute for the privilege of being able to use it.

BTW, did anyone who modded parent up happen to notice the URL and content of his shared homepage? He's hardly an impartial observer in this matter: he has a specific vested interest in promoting this "SaaS". SaaS very much a threat... to anyone not producing or selling it. The people promoting it aim to tip the economic balance even farther in their favor. Sure, supposedly we all have that goal in common, but some people are greedier than others. It's large corporations that will benefit from "SaaS", not the little guy.

"Welcome To The Future!"

[DynaSoar]

Subject is quote from "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus" by Firesign Theatre. Apropo, no?

"businesses and IT departments must adjust to the fact that everything's starting to move to the cloud"

When a pundit* makes a claim that comes true, they collect on the only currency involved -- publicity -- by reminding you at every chance. When they're wrong, which is usually, they simply wait until so few remember that if anyone does bring it up, they can easily explain things away with a line of BS (what they call Believable Statements) that they've developed since realizing they were wrong.

* Pun' dit (n): from

(1) "pun", a statement with a double meaning; those agile enough with language to earn the name pundit can manipulate the double meaning to be polar opposites, such as "is" and "is not". (A recent inquiry into the activities of one such person resulted in their tacit admission in belonging to this class of person, when they asked of the investigators, "Define 'is'.") Through the application of this inclusive exclusion, such a person can claim to have meant what they meant when they said it, and if necessary to have meant the opposite. A truly superior practitioner can not only apply this, but also make it appear as though it were the listener's fault for the confusion.

and from:

(2) dit, from Morse Code "dit" and "dah", known as "dot" and "dash" to non-Morse speakers. This is the equivalent to a single trinary "trit" of information in that it can take either active state (dit or dah), or not be there at all (a wait state). Applied to Boolean, it is the basis of the IF...THEN...MAYBE statement, the 'fuzzy logic' extension of IF...THEN...ELSE. By itself (ie. with no associated data or wait state) the single trit "dit" means nothing at all.

Thus, "pundit" is one who can take a piece of information, useless by itself, and by association with another statement, imply a meaning to it with which they may then later prove that they meant X or that they meant NOT X. For instance, a person at a tech-oriented new organization can make a statement like "everything's moving to the cloud", and when everything doesn't, claim that by "everything" they meant also "everything else", and by "is" they meant "isn't", yielding "everything is moving to the cloud, except everything that isn't moving to the cloud." If it seems that the phrase "some things" would be more appropriate, you are not a pundit. They use "everything" because it can be used as "everything is", "everything isn't" or "everything is except everything that isn't", and changed according to the need of the pundit to appear to be right at the cost of looking like an idiot, or even worse, a politician.

See also "pendantic"; similar to "pedantic" (holding forth at length with the appearance, even if not in actual fact, of being an authority), but taken from "pendulous" for 'swinging back and forth freely, usually something that is very low hanging', and "antic" a comical behavior.