ComputerWorld published The case against cloud comuting, part one yesterday. The arguments are mostly about how hard it is to make the paradigm shift for the external Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud solutions. The headline implies the arguments apply to any of the related cloud computing technologies, but they don’t really. The article is a little bit whiny: "Its too hard!". No doubt there are challenges and required new ways of thinking about how to manage things with the new architectures. No doubt there are legacy vendors and technology investments that are going to suffer. No doubt there are old timers in IT who like things the way they are.
Some of the arguments sound exactly like the arguments we heard with the emergence of distributed computing. A paradigm shift is underway and the younger, nimbler, and adaptable IT enterprises are going to leapfrog into the new age. Mainframes never went away, and may never go away. Legacy static architecture and fat clients aren’t going to completely go away either. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes simply because they have momentum.