“You want bleeding-edge mission-critical cross platform robust scalable architectures?  Well, duh. That’s what everybody wants.  What you want is “e.” Pure e.”

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I lived through the dotcom bust – I was a fresh faced developer just starting to get my stride.   I was in the office with too many Aeron chairs in a hip loft with lots of iMac’s and cable lighting.  After the parties ended, when the bottom fell out, there was not much left to do but look around and say “What happened?”  We all moved on, some of us started companies, some went to work for the Web 2.0 giants, some went to the Fortune 500.   For anyone who experienced those wacky days, especially in New York City, the movie August is a trip down memory lane.

Set in the waning days of the dotcom era pre-9/11, August captures glimpses of the reality and promise of that time.  The writer uses some awkward terms (“Click-and mortar”) and the acting and story aren’t particulary interesting.  But the essence of the day is there  – the office set is spot on, as is the CNBC-like interview in the opening scene.  Theres talk of Bezos, option lockups, and Gulfstreams.

Beyond the nostalgia, some of the writing touched a nerve with me as I thought about all of the good ideas (and bad ones) that didn’t quite have the chance to make it because of costs, bandwidth, and lack of existing services.  August was like that glowing orange copy of WIRED Magazine from 1999 that sat on my desk too long – reminding me of how both exciting and futile those days were.   How could we build the next great medium when we had to build for downlevel browsers and 56k dialup?  What can you do when ideas take millions of dollars of hardware and software just to get going?   With the emergence of the Cloud -  the hope and hype of the dotcom days may actually be realized.

The Cloud is pure “e”

The Cloud is freedom. It is unfiltered, immediate, and cheap innovation power.  It’s not just content delivery, storage, CPUs, or memory.   It is boundless rendering farms. It’s supercomputer simulation and modeling for the masses.  It’s world-class software, platforms, and infrastructure to build whatever you want without having to worry about what it might cost you if it doesn’t work out.  Thomas Edison would have been a fan.

In academia, imagine what this access will mean to the next generation of students and professors?  The same kids who are putting up EC2 clusters for C.S. class are going to be in the next doctoral programs at Stanford, Berkeley, MIT.  They’ll be working for cloud services and product firms building the next generation of Internet technology.   The physical sciences and social sciences will also benefit from the ability to conduct limitless experiments at extremely low costs.

The government it using it on sites like Whitehouse.gov; and in probably other places that aren’t so public.

For those of us in the private sector we are presented with a unique opportunity to offer new products and services that would be unimaginable just a few years ago because of both costs and technical capabilties.

The economy is accelerating the adoption cycle

The slowing economy is forcing companies to take a look at the Cloud.  It was going to take many more years for the adoption of industrial strength software, platform, and infrastructure in a decent economy.   Without pressure to cut costs, there was little incentive for IT managers to take risk.

But the time has come.  Saving money is more important than sacred cows like email and infrastructure.   I’ve been in a dozen meetings in the past 45 days with CIO’s, CEO’s, and other decision makers at large firms.  They all feel it coming.  The smart money is going to the Cloud – in one form or another.  Who wants to be the CIO or direct report who recommends spending more money on traditional IT without evaluating the cloud?  How many  IT careers are in the making because of shrewd decisions and well executed plans that result in millions of dollars in cost savings?

What Fortune 500 CIO would have said this in 2007?

“Let’s put all of our corporate email and sales and customer data on some network that is located somewhere we don’t know, on hardware we’ve never seen.  We’ll pay them a modest yearly fee, only for the employees actually using it, and we don’t have to spend too much more worrying about it after we make the switch.  By the way, it only takes a few days or weeks to setup, even for tens of thousands of users.  And it works from a $250 netbook, a Blackberry, or a laptop that we never have to install software on.”

Not one.  They couldn’t.  This stuff didn’t exist the way it does now.

But they are saying it now – maybe in not those exact words, but with their wallets. They are saying it at small and large companies alike. The CFO is in charge now and she wants to lower costs and increase productivity.

The enterprise is adopting the Cloud. With software like Google Apps and Salesforce, platforms like AppEnine and Force.com, and infrastructure from Amazon.  There are dozens more promising products and services coming online everyday.

This isn’t going to be easy, but neither is golf or surfing.  There is a community of people working hard to find opportunities and develop this industry despite the slow overall economy.   As a bonus, much of the innovation is happening here in the United States, for as old industries die we need to create new ones for our children and future generations.  The pure “e” of the Cloud will be the catalyst for the next IT revolution.

PS -  Thanks to my friend Eric from Klotnet for lending me the August DVD.