Cloudy visions of the future
Regular commentator Bill Thompson looks forward to cheap net access and cloud computing. — If you're ever asked to forecast the way computing will develop, offer to look three to five years ahead. — It's a good, safe time frame because if you're right …
Context & Ripple Effects
Thompson's column lands at the peak of year-end forecasting season: a week earlier the Economist ran its own Technology in 2008 preview, and Thompson's contribution stakes out a deliberately safe three-to-five-year window built on two claims — cheap net access and cloud computing.
The forecast is also the synthesis of his own running themes at the BBC: in November 2007 he argued it may be time to build web services that can be trusted, and in December he defended plans to bring laptops to the developing world against misplaced criticism. Cheap access plus cloud is where those threads meet.
First-order effects
- Thompson hands readers a concrete, testable benchmark for 2008-2012 — cheap connectivity and computation delivered as a network service — sitting alongside the Economist's broader 2008 outlook rather than competing with it.
Second-order effects
- If cheap-access-plus-cloud hardens into the shared premise of the season's forecast pieces, device-centric roadmaps come under pressure to explain how they fit a world where the network, not the machine, holds the computing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the binding constraint on cloud adoption becomes exactly what Thompson flagged in November — whether web services can be made trustworthy — shifting industry attention from raw capability to reliability and accountability of hosted services.
The trend: Year-end technology forecasting is converging on cloud computing and cheap universal connectivity as the defining shift of the late 2000s.