Yeah, sorry if I wasn't clear. And the point I'm trying to touch on here is the effect of Cloud Computing on applications and therefore the end user. A little indirect, but important at least to us. I didn't mean to suggest that standards will automatically emerge, and I think you raise totally valid points on the self-preservation front. There's nothing to suggest that things will be different than they have been.
What I'm thinking about with cloud computing interoperability is Identity, Authorization, Billing, User Management, Provisioning.
One thing that I think you can see in at least SMB software in the cloud, is that the promise is to provide to the SMB all the capabilities that a fortune 2000 company would have. B2B transactions, HR and benefits online for their employees, etc.
The easy availability of Cloud computing makes it simple for applications companies to spring up quickly with new services that are useful and scalable. But while standalone sounds good on paper, the small business will have a hard time picking which services to use, and making sense of all the different accounts that are billing them.
To do these things, you need some kind of aggregation, standardization, integration or all of the above. Again, picking on the SMB here, I think the end user is going to expect to have some type of baseline integration between their SMB apps.
So I think the point I'm trying to get out is that with a major platform advance like Cloud Computing, I think this will generate a lot of pressure to have interoperability, and standards will emerge de facto from the most popular providers. The less popular providers will end up having to interoperate with the most popular until there are really 2 or 3 left.
jeff
From: cloud-computing@googlegroups.com [mailto:cloud-computing@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Brothers
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008 3:45 AM
To: cloud-computing@googlegroups.com
Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] Re: cloud and user experience
Sorry, I don't see any sort of forcing. I see Google, Sun, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and SAP (at least) all working hard to create proprietary platforms that do certain things well, and other things poorly. I see people building apps to work with one, and having a terrible time integrating with each other. I see businesses springing up that capitalize on this, and acting as integrators, and providing just enough connectivity that the "big guys" are able to delay standardization for a long time - 5 to 10 to 15 years.
And I don't see any sort of rapid consolidation, interoperability and standardization of Cloud infrastructure. I'm not even sure what you're talking about. Can you elaborate?
Let me make myself clear - yes, interop and standardization would be good things for end users. Doesn't mean they're going to happen, and a lot of people have a strong vested interest in not letting that happen so their businesses don't become commoditized.
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 8:15 PM, Collins, Jeff <Jeff_Collins@intuit.com> wrote:
But I agree that interoperability will be forced very quickly toward some kind of interop standard. I also agree that the most widely adopted early protocols will probably just become standard (e.g. OFX). Identity, authorization, and other standards will quickly become very high priority.
We're seeing the incredibly rapid consolidation, interoperability and standardization of Cloud infrastructure, and I think it will rapidly drive different behavior of applications one level above it in the Cloud. The end user will benefit because the applications they use will essentially be designed from the start to work together well based on being Componentized from the start as said below.
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