Valentin's Blog

In other countries lots of money is spend on electronic health records and digitizing medicine because of the (imho well founded) believe, that in the long run this will enable massive cost savings and improvements in quality. Not so in Germany - here our new government just decided that the introduction of electronic health care records needs to be slowed down and needs to be reevaluated (because they are afraid that privacy cannot be guaranteed and because they want to save a few millions in the short run). Ah well, guess in 20 years Germany can then just buy a finished solution from some high tech country - after another 100,000 people have died from preventable drug side effects and drug interactions (only one of the things that could be tackled really well with electronic health records).

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.

 

Again a very nice TED talk about the web and its development... includes some interesting thoughts on understanding the web as "the one most reliable machine humankind has ever build", a machine with 170 quadrillion transistors, 9 exabyte of RAM ...

The talk is embedded below and accessible here http://blog.ted.com/2008/07/the_first_5000.php