Future Cloud

dystopia (dĭs-tō'pē-ə) noun.

1. a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding

The hyperbole employed by Nicholas Carr in The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google may turn out to be an accurate prediction.

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The basic idea is that cloud computing is going to catch on, this time. What this means for IT staff is joblessness, and what this means for the world is: the failure of traditional businesses; rampant "big brother"-ism; a further shift of profits from producers to aggregators; the continued rotting of human culture; and growing political rifts among the populace.

Many companies, like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce, are already starting to provide grid computing to the general public. Many businesses, especially small ones, will opt for paying pennies for data storage and processing power instead of maintaining their own staff and hardware.

We will probably also see a reemergence of dumb terminals that simply access the network/internet. Also, zero-client, web 2.0 technology will go from a feature to a requirement.

It's a very interesting time for the world, and hopefully it's not the beginning of the end.