Page 130 - 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

industry dominance. This vendor play for dominance has been
a prominent feature of each previous phase of computing.
Vendors have a right to seek a return on their investment. But
I find it hard to believe that we really have to go through an-
other protracted phase of attempted customer lock-in, the way
the mainframe captured customers for IBM or Windows for

Microsoft. After a certain period, these lock-ins have nothing
to do with return on investment and everything to do with
realizing long-term profits without having to compete on a
level playing field. With luck, consumers won’t put up with it
this time around.
Until competition arises and populates the Internet with a
daisy chain of cloud data centers around the globe, we are go-

ing to live through a period of attempts at dominance cloaked
as proprietary initiatives. Proprietary initiatives in a free econ-
omy are a valuable thing; they’re what’s bringing us the first
cloud data centers. But initiative is one thing and permanent,
involuntary end user ensnarement is another. At the moment,
there’s practically no way for cloud customers to avoid some
degree of lock-in.
For example, Amazon Web Services relied on open source
code that was freely available in the public arena, such as the

Linux operating system and the Xen hypervisor, to build its
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a move that made sense be-
cause freely downloadable open source code can be replicated
over and over again as the cloud scales out, without incurring
license charges. Although the code was based on Xen, Ama-
zon Web Services tweaked the file format in which its EC2
cloud’s virtual machines are built. It came up with a format,

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