Valentin's Blog

This weeks Economist leads with a story about the battle of the clouds. The two articles (here and here) are - as usual - well worth a read. However, its kind of surprising that The Economist sees the battle of the clouds only in directly customer facing applications (such as Google Mail, MobileMe or the Facebook website) and as a three way battle between Google, Microsoft and Apple (no Amazon or Salesforce).

This is really a very restricted way to look at cloud computing; it misses the use of the cloud as a platform that is leveraged by other parties to create customer facing applications. The Economist then also fails to understand the breath of Microsoft's vision: Azure is the next operating systems and Microsoft imagines third party software vendors (that used to create Windows applications) to create Azure applications that are then executed in the Azure cloud. Microsoft will then directly profit from the sale and use of these third party applications (much more directly than they used to in the days of Windows).

Because of this restricted view on cloud computing The Economist then also misses the real battlefield in the battle of the clouds - i.e. the question which cloud will be the platform that third party developers will use to create their applications. Its telling that they fail to mention either Salesforce or Google's AppEngine - core contenders in this battle of the clouds.