The Cloud Computing Manifesto

This might date me - but one of my favourite movies is flick called "Network".  It features a psychotic newscaster who leads a revolution of TV viewers who charge to their window screaming, "We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!"

I must have a soft spot for that type of sentiment.  Because one of my favourite books is the Cluetrain Manifesto.  I love the line - "We are not eyeballs, or clicks, we are human beings -- live with it!"

About bloody time, is what I've said.  And apparently so have a lot of others.  Today's customer isn't going to take it anymore.  Anyone with a business knows that.  All those predictions in the original Cluetrain Manifesto have come true.  In today's world, if you aren't better, faster, cheaper --- your customer is gone in a click.

For the longest time, IT has been exempt from that.  If you had an IT provider you'd bitch and whine, but it was what author Don Tapscott called the Hotel California syndrome.  (For those who are too young to remember the Eagles, the quote comes from a line in their song Hotel California which goes - "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!" )

Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle -- it didn't matter which monolith we talked about.  You didn't own them -- they owned you.  You had such an investment in them that you had to stay.  Even if you outsourced, you never left them that far behind.  Either they supplied the outsourcer -- or they were the outsourcer.

Well, those days are done.