This is about the 20 millionth blog post or article that has been written with some reaction to last week’s *new* Google Chrome OS announcement. For the most part, it was a surprise announcement – mostly because it was not leaked to the press.

I have posted about Google in a mostly positive light (“Google: No brag, just fact”; “What’s the Thing with Bing?”) but I do not own any Google stock or have any financial interest whatsoever, directly or indirectly. And, my point-of-view is going to be widely different than most of what is out there. Since I am not wedded to any particular technology, all I have to ask is, why would or should I care (as a CIO, consultant, consumer, etc.)?

I have read some great posts (PC Mag’s Michael Miller; CIO.com’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols) that have really thought out and carefully presented the author’s arguments in the following major categories: 1) Microsoft killer; 2) Linux killer; 3) gives Google the keys to the world; 4) is it really ‘open’;  5) is this really ‘new’? All good questions and perspectives, but the answers don’t really mean much.

So, to the fundamental question: why would I (or you) care? I guess I would care if it changed my (or your) life in some way or another, positively or negatively. So, if I am a CIO, I might be concerned about this throwing a monkey-wrench into my carefully thought out strategic technology plan.

Maybe I was planning on rolling out Windows 7. But, now, I might be worried that I am going to be playing the IT version of the game “52 card pick-up”.

Now, as a consultant, I might welcome all of this uncertainty. Consultants get rich when there is a lot of head-scratching going on and someone has to come in and tell the folks what to do.

As a technologist, I might be fuming (or celebrating) that this is going to be marginalizing the good work of the open source community and related foundations that have coordinated and sponsored projects to get some cohesion in a smaller set of more robust Linux distros. Why might I be upset? With Google “branding” and financial might, they might be a force that pulls from, rather than nurtures, the continuing development of mainstream (read Ubuntu) Linux. On the other hand, I might now have many more opportunities to work on the newest of the new things.

As a consumer, I can already get a netbook with Linux and OS X on a Mac, will there be something magical that happens with new product capabilities?

Naw. Bottom line is that the CIO will move forward, as planned.  The technologists will have spirited debates like they always do and groups will splinter off – as they always do. As a consumer, I’ll just be wondering what new feature I will get to pay for in some new gadget.

At the end of the day, it is all about innovation, competition and all the things that need to keep happening to advance the state-of-the-art and either create new value or steal more share of what is already there. Microsoft still stands out in the ‘crowd’. Of course, that ‘crowd’ is becoming one of more or less equals.

And I never, ever, thought that Java would be an Oracle product.

So things change.

And that is exactly what we want. Without it, we still might be running Windows 98 SE. There is so much stuff out there, it will be decades of disruption before the things we talk about now are as ho-hum and boring as telephones, flushing toilets and electricity.

Until then, it will be like Al Bernstein once said, “Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.”

©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

As the hype continues regarding “Cloud Computing”, there are now tales from those who have recently experienced the current offerings of these services.

Also, there are more and more seasoned, veteran practitioners of information technology (“IT”) that have been at conferences, had prosepctive suppliers call on them and, in a number of cases, carefully “dipped their toe” in the water on a self-contained project.

But, at the end of the day, does anyone really know what cloud computing really is? I am sure this video with a number of well-known names will clear it up for you:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PNuQHUiV3Q

Further evidence that the hype is doing little to clarify or capture the mind share of IT leaders, except, perhaps for curiosity, comes from Tim Anderson and his recent post “Cloud Computing Survey: More Fog Than Cloud” :

“…the survey was undermined by the fact that most of those surveyed admitted to not knowing what cloud computing is. The reason is not ignorance, but the many and various ways the term is used. The common strand is that it is something to do with the internet, but even that is undermined if we describe virtual on-premise servers as a “private cloud”.

Looking at it another way, as James Urquhart recently posted: “Cloud computing is an operations model, not a technology”.

And, for now, we need to leave it there. Rather than being dazzled with the details of the underlying technologies that are being strung together to form new product offerings, we should be focusing on what this means for fundamental computer operations.

The first thing that people seem to be realizing is that the vendor-supplier relationship has some new (and perhaps re-ignited old) dynamics that are now highly-sensitised. One of the first that comes to mind is the issue of “trust”.

For IT people, trust is built on a number of foundational elements. In some ways, there is an unspoken knowledge between technically-oriented individuals about whether the person they are dealing with has been-there, done-that, in terms of delivering the “goods” on a project or two. More respected are those that have had to live with their “creations”. That is, they had to stick around and live with the results by supporting things post go-live. In other words, the solution had to work. It is great when it happens that the person(s) you are dealing with on the other side know what they are doing and can back it up with the real-world cuts, scrapes and bruises of putting these solutions in place.

When it comes to something like cloud computing, though, you are not only reliant on others to deliver something (like a product or solution). You are going to be entrusting some very valuable assets (i.e. data) behind the unknown bastions of the cloud sourcer’s world. [I think I just "coined" a phrase: "cloudsourcer".]

As Bruce Schneir put it in his recent blog post:

“IT security is about trust. You have to trust your CPU manufacturer, your hardware, operating system and software vendors – and your ISP. Any one of these can undermine your security: crash your systems, corrupt data, allow an attacker to get access to systems. We’ve spent decades dealing with worms and rootkits that target software vulnerabilities. We’ve worried about infected chips. But in the end, we have no choice but to blindly trust the security of the IT providers we use.”

Of course, the simple recognition that trust is a key factor is not enough. Those of us who have put together and been responsible for large-scale outsourcing contracts know a bit about how bad things can get on the inside of these service delivery “factories”. It is simply a nightmare management issue.

Anyone who thinks that taking out your credit card and ringing up Amazon to stand up some servers real quick probably feels pretty good about not having to traverse the enterprise gauntlet for capital or project funds and their project is well on its way.

But, unless you are a start-up or other entity that has little to no legacy applications, integration issues, highly-sensitive data, multi-national compliance issues, customer service level requirements that you can guarantee to your own customers, etc., cloud computing is going to be something that you nibble around the edges on for a long time. After a while, there will be settling of standards and the market will judge the winners and losers.

But making a full-blown decision now to put it all on the line is simply out of the question. It is not about the paint not being dry. The wall hasn’t even been sanded and primed and is not even ready for paint.

To continue Bruces Schneier’s thoughts:

“Trust is a concept as old as humanity, and the solutions are the same as they have always been. Be careful who you trust, be careful what you trust them with, and be careful how much you trust them. Outsourcing is the future of computing. Eventually we’ll get this right, but you don’t want to be a casualty along the way.”

Is the tide turning against cloud computing? In its present form, I think “Yes”. Already, we are seeing new morphing of the idea of the cloud computing construct known as “SaaS” (Software-as-a-Service). Now, of course, we see “CaaS” for computing-as-a-service as a new marketing spin.

How many names can we give to the old idea of time sharing, network computing, etc.? The answer is probably “endless”. The bottom line is that customers are currently dealing with a curiosity that will someday have to be a bulletproof, industrial strength for of outsourcing. For that, it has a long, long way to go.

I have a lot more to say on these matters as you will see in future posts. Our companion blog, CIO Rant, is also full of some deeper discussion into some of these issues. I invite you to take a look.

In any case, I would greatly appreciate comments, which are easy to post.