This article on cloud appeared in the Economist.com on April 12th 2001 titled “The Beast of Complexities” Stuart Feldman of IBM, mentions these examples. Quote ‘Picture yourself as the product manager of a new hand-held computer whose design team has just sent him the electronic blueprint for the device. You go to your personalized web portal and order the components, book manufacturing capacity and arrange for distribution. With the click of a mouse, you create an instant supply chain that, once the job is done, will dissolve again.” unquote.

Another example quote “Imagine, says the man from IBM that you are running on empty and want to know the cheapest open petrol station within a mile. You speak into your cellphone, and seconds later you get the answer on the display. This sounds simple, but it requires a combination of a multitude of electronic services, including a voice-recognition and natural-language service to figure out what you want, a location service to find the open petrol stations near you and a comparison-shopping service to pick the cheapest one.” unquote.

In the same article he also lamented that so far, nobody has found a silver bullet to kill the Beast of Complexity.

The silver bullet for cloud computing ‘could’ be a new operating system, a cluster of applications offered like the MS Office suites supporting cloud computing, a TLN (Top Level Network) instead of TLD, to enable users to register, may it be individual, business or service ‘plus’ all those registered in TLDs, the new set up has to be ‘all inclusive’. The magnitude is staggering, this would bring into play number analogy which could provide space for all and yet not run out of numbers, at the same time allow multiple users to have the same namespace.

Once that is in place, comes the question of common standards which Vint Cerf was talking about, it would not be easy to make people come together to set and accept common standards, it is only services like say email, which compel every body to adopt to common standards.

Stuart Feldman also mentions that Cloud computing is something big that is happening in the industry—as big as the rise of the PC in the 1980s, unquote this is even true today after a decade.