Page 207 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

C A L C ULATING THE FUTURE

Under the cloud computing model, customers can come
to the company’s Web site not only to view information, but
also to activate services in which the company gives away some-
thing that illustrates its core competence and passion for a sub-
ject area. The information or service used to be bundled into
a product with a price tag. Now the customer is impressed with

what the company can do for him before he’s spent a dollar.
Finding such an extended hand useful, the customer comes
back for more and finds that the company has a list of services
that the customer can activate, order to do certain things, and
control. The customer can designate services and use them as
tools to build a custom product—a special piece of outdoor
gear, a compost machine that fits into a corner of the base-

ment, or a business service that combines what were previ-
ously separate services into one. In the future, all these things
might be possible because the cloud can host sophisticated
software that has incorporated business rules, professional
knowledge, and even specialized knowledge, such as a com-
plex chemical process, and can use them to build a sophisti-
cated product or service. And at the same time, the software
can be activated and manipulated by a remote end user em-
ploying a home PC or an even simpler computing device. The

control will be extended to the user by building simple user
interfaces in front of the complex computing system. With
“programmatic control” over how services are manipulated,
the customer can direct the software services to do things and
be dazzled by the amount of expertise that’s been handed off
to him. And such a customer will keep coming back for more.

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