Page 217 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

C A L C ULATING THE FUTURE

clamshell aircraft that could take off, stage a shallow climb
to 130,000 feet over 48 hours, and from there convert a jet
engine into a rocket motor for blastoff into space. Once in
space, the vehicle used the moon and earth’s gravity to whip
it around and send it on its return trip, just like the antique
Apollo space capsules had done. Being able to say that you’d

seen the dark side of the moon seemed to make the $7,349
price of a ticket worth it, and the spacecraft’s makers even had
the nerve to say that the carbon footprint of the trip was no
greater than that of a regular passenger’s flight from Los An-
geles to New York. How could that be? The aerospace engi-
neer said that it would have taken platoons of engineers and
several billion dollars to come up with the design of the tourist

spacecraft at his company, but somehow OuterAdventures
Inc. had done it. Now all that the airlines were interested in
was building up their fleets of clamshell spacecraft. How had
his firm missed this market? He was employed only part time
and was trying to find someone who was interested in his jet
airplane design skills.
This same story was repeated in many forms over and over
again until it was clear that a broad disruption was sweeping
through much of the economy. No one could point a finger at

a single cause, but many industry segments were undergoing
rapid change. One thing was clear. Many of the parties that
were driving the changes were using the cloud, but you were
never sure exactly how they were using it. Sometime around
EC2’s fifth birthday, the self-provisioning end user and the
cloud data center seemed to mesh into one ongoing, disrup-
tive force.

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