As my poor, suffering wife knows all too well, I have an obsession.
Okay, obsession may be too strong a word. But it’s something more than mere fascination.
I’m talking, of course, of shipping containers. Those big, steel boxes that trains, trucks, and massive container ships use to schlep goods all over the world. They’re the greatest things.
True, they’re not much to look at. But in fact, it’s their simplicity that makes them so profoundly cool. These simple boxes completely transformed the transport of goods. They rebuilt and made vastly more efficient the rail and port industries. They made transporting goods, whether cross-country or across the world, mindbendingly cheap. With infotech as the mortar, shipping containers have been the building blocks of that vast and complex edifice, the global economy. Little wonder the BBC called the humble box one of the 10 greatest inventions of the last century.
With such an elegantly industrial (and tangible) item to obsess over, I never found the nebulous “new economy” Kool-Aid whipped up at the turn of the millennium to be a bewitching brew.
But I’m drinking now. The 21st century has given rise to its own shipping container equivalent: cloud computing.
Very simply—and it is simple—cloud computing allows you to operate your computer without having to load hardly any software. Spreadsheets, word processing, presentations, and many other applications reside in “the cloud”: actually, a vast (and tangible) galaxy of interconnected Internet servers. And working via the cloud means that it’s vastly easier to store, share, and access your keystrokes, wherever you are.
The more I learn about it, the more I believe that cloud computing, particularly given the rise of stripped-down laptops and netbooks (mobile devices will no doubt be able to cloud-compute, too), are going to fundamentally transform and rebuild communications, just as containers re-engineered transport.
It’s a serious movement. Wired editor and info-economist Chris Anderson is doing more and more of his computing in the cloud. The feds are looking at using it to save money and simplify information management.
There are dark linings. There are serious questions about how secure cloud-stored data is. And it’s not clear who controls that data.
Any disruptive technology will result in some established businesses being crushed. Containers destroyed many a waterfront culture (think New York and London). And you can make a good case that the globalization that containers helped deliver has destroyed more than businesses—namely, people and their living space. The cloud may have its own “winners” and “losers” (better words are needed).
Last Sunday’s must-read New York Times Magazine article on data centers (the neural nodes of the cloud) reported that Microsoft is finding that the best way to store and maintain their centers’ servers is by lodging them in—that’s right—shipping containers.
That’s almost too good to be true.
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