The Cloud

We've been talking about the web and the evolution of software pricing, from product to service. In the post about pricing we travelled through time a little bit to a time that was effectively pre-internet, and distribution channels looked very different to how they look today. In the post about the web I focused on what happens on the device receiving content. Now I want to talk about the other side.

Modern content delivery over the internet is facilitated by layers of computer infrastructure. It is often not just about getting information from A to B, it is also about ensuring that infrastructure is not inundated with fraudulent requests, that the information is retrievable within a timely manner, that the information is up to date and that the infrastructure costs are not prohibitively expensive.

Things were not always this way. Let's travel back in time once again to when internet infrastructure was not well developed and computational power was significantly less impressive by modern standards. In this time, software developers that wanted to serve content over the web would either own their infrastructure or rent by the machine, which at a certain scale was simply not feasible. If they rented by the machine, they would have to try to predict the usage of their services, and if there was a shortfall they would see an outage. If there was a surplus, there would be no kind of refund and they would simply pay for a capacity that exceeded demand.

The public cloud offered a more flexible pay-as-you-go model and in doing so transformed the landscape of modern software in a way that would reshape the market and society. An expectation that your data will travel with you across devices became increasingly normalised as applications leveraged the cloud to deliver cross-device digital experiences. Where data was previously stored, or "trapped", it could either migrate wholesale to the cloud or there may be a reconciliation between device states and what lives in the cloud as per sources of truth. Like many large scale transformations the changes were not felt universally. There were applications that continued to store their data on the device, applications that moved to the cloud, and applications that attempted to reconcile.

For the applications that moved entirely to the cloud they contributed to a reshaping of software markets in a number of ways. One was technological - with the cloud, software applications are able to outsource work, resulting in a decoupling of device capability from the realised digital product.

Others are social. For one, people who live in areas that are without established internet infrastructure who were previously able to navigate digital space as well as anyone were now less able to do so. For another, applications that continued to support usage outside of an ability to reach the cloud faced a fork in the road. When you have two computers doing the work, you're able to do more work. When you have one computer doing all of the work, you either do less work, or you do the work less well. This becomes more apparent the less capable the user's device is, and the more sophisticated the functionality associated with the software at hand is.

The cloud changed many things. In the last decade it has shaped society, the market, projects, digital factories and their supply chains. It is probably not done yet.

Until next time.