Backed by the might of Silicon Valley Cloud Boosters tend to see the Cloud as an irrevocable trend, and one that just brings magic with it. Against this, US critics as distinguished as Steve (Apple) Wozniak and the IT author Cory Doctorow have attacked the Cloud in terms of who gets to control your data, and in terms of its cost and speed when compared with local alternatives. Properly done, however, outsourcing can help create Winners. And those who fail to make a balance assessment of the Cloud's merits will turn out losers.

1. THE CLOUD:
Boosters, Critics, Winners ... and Losers
Presentation to
The friends of COBWEB
by
@JamesWoudhuysen
February 2015

4. George Favaloro: he coined ‘Cloud
Computing’, at Compaq in 1996

5. Eric Schmidt’s New Digital Age!
INTERNET: ‘an online world that is not truly bound by
terrestrial laws… a lawless space, ungoverned and
ungovernable by design…
CLOUD: ‘only reinforces the permanence of information,
adding another layer of remote protection for users and
their information...
In post-conflict situations, ‘Truth- and-reconciliation
committees will feature a trove of digital records
In Libya, ‘many of the militia fighters were integrated
into the newly created army...’
Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age, 2013

9. Cloudfinder general, USA: Gene L Dodaro

10. CLOUD COMPUTING
Additional
Opportunities and
Savings Need to Be
Pursued
September 2014
GAO-14-753
United States Government Accountability Office
Report to Congressional Requesters

12. Boosters: the cloud is...
• Something that just brings magic with it
• Seamless
•The solution to everything
•An irrevocable trend and one You Must Obey

13. Critics

17. ‘It’s going to be horrendous’ – the Woz
‘With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already
signed it away...
‘I want to feel that I own things. A lot of people feel,
“Oh, everything is really on my computer”‚ but the
more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the
cloud, the less we’re going to have control over
it...’
Steve Wozniak,Washington,August 2012

19. ‘Your hard drive brims with capacity’ – Cory
Doctorow
‘It costs nothing to use (after you’ve paid for it
once, and leaving aside the electrical bill). It is
vastly faster than any wide-area network link.
Contrast with wireless bandwidth: there’s only
one RF spectrum, and you have to share it with
everyone within range of your device.
‘Increasing your demands on the wireless
spectrum comes at the expense of my use of
that same spectrum.’
Cory Doctorow, February 2013

21. Giacomo Balla, Numbers in Love, 1920

22. Just a little hyperbole from Marc
‘Our greatest challenge is making
sense of that data. And we need a new
generation of tools to be able to
organise and view the data...
‘We don’t need more cloud.We don’t
need more mobile.We don’t need more
social. We need more data science.’
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff,
Fortune, 22 January 2015

23. Critics vs the Cloud
Who controls your data?
Cost and speed vs local
alternatives
Data interpretation and visualisation

25. Winners

26. Agility: sense + respond in real-time

30. It makes sense
to share
Author:
James Woudhuysen
Professor of Forecasting and Innovation
De Montfort University
October 2005

31. Author
James Woudhuysen
Professor of Forecasting and Innovation
De Montfort University
Spring 2012
Back on track
Supporting the development
of a 21st century rail network

32. A means of making yourself different

33. Winners
Firms that use the Cloud to be
•Agile
•A platform for the added value of human
brains and insight
A platform for differentiation

34. Losers
All those who fail to make a
balanced assessment of the
Cloud’s merits – and of what it
can’t do

35. One thing they’ll never automate

37. Thank you!
@JamesWoudhuysen
www.Woudhuysen.com