Page 224 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

communities with their customers, giving them free expertise
and services on top of the products they sell, and listening to
their feedback. The model for such communities is the open
source code project, where a core of skilled developers con-
tributes code and manages a product, while a much larger
community of users contributes additional code when it can

and tests the code that the core developers say is ready for use.
The lines of communication are short and direct; the code’s
the thing, and someone who is skilled at electronic interac-
tions cultivates the community and listens to its feedback. If
companies had communities of users instead of “customer
bases,” they would multiply the channels for feedback and
build that feedback into their product specification and de-

sign processes.
Whatever your strategy may be, it must recognize that the
cloud is going to serve as an ongoing, democratizing force,
putting more computer power into the hands of all kinds of
end users and delivering more expertise and services to them.
The cloud will share many kinds of professional intelligence
in specialized fields with the masses, and in some cases, indi-
vidual recipients are going to augment that intelligence with
their own.

The cloud is a continuation of the original end user revolt
against centralized computing and the master/slave relation-
ship. Now end users have their own computers, and they are
rapidly changing their capabilities and form. They have come
to realize that carrying your own computer with you is not the
only way to take charge of your computing needs. The serv-
ices of a powerful networked data center can greatly augment

204