So while this opinion may not be popular, Clouds sure feels like mainframe service bureaus all over again. Let’s look at the pieces and you decide.

1. The systems were all pretty much the same so all we really had to do was change the JCL deck to describe what resources the job needed.
2. If you had an account already setup, you might have even been able to do remote job entry (RJE).
3. You shopped your jobs around to several houses because one might have been cheaper for checks, while the other cheaper for long jobs.
4. Since IBM ruled the industry, job decks were almost interchangeable, and in some cases the base application package was there as part of the “services” provided by the bureau.

So while I’m NOT saying that Clouds are JUST like the service bureaus of the old days; I am suggesting that we might be able to look back at them to help keep Clouds in perspective. Right now the cloud offerings are very closely tied to the underlying operating system, but I’m predicting that as Google shows more and more successes ( especially if Google University really takes off) then perhaps we might start seeing a bit more homogenization of the application environment for clouds. Depending upon who you talk to, Clouds might sound like virtualization, or it might sound like the Apple iStore. If we’re to listen to science fiction (especially Arthur C. Clarke) you would envision a world where you “rented” applications to do certain things, occasionally submitting something customized for those special purpose things. However, all you had was a “tube” and you really didn’t care where the computing was done, it was all in the cloud. If you read books like Clark’s “Fountains of Paradise” you’d see that even the monks atop a high mountain peak had a “tube”, computing had become that ubiquitous.

Whatever direction clouds will go will be determined by how you vote with your dollars. So far there are one heck of a lot of votes at Amazon AWS, but don’t count Google out yet. Then of course there is the dark horse just getting ready to leave the starting blocks…and that’s Microsoft. Can the 10000lb gorilla change the world of clouds like it did desktop operating systems? Or will the world finally embrace an open source world? Only time and technobucks will tell…

Any way you look at it, Clouds are a white hot topic…and with a track dedicated to the debate, I sure wish I could listen to all those hallway conversations.

Tags: clouds, history of clouds, mainframe, New York 2009, service bureaus, virtualization

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