To me, the cloud-computing landscape feels like the Web search landscape in 1996. Back then, Everybody who’d thought about it had clued in that this was going t

To me, the cloud-computing landscape feels like the Web search landscape in 1996. Back then, Everybody who’d thought about it had clued in that this was going to be really interesting and useful. There had been a few offerings, much better than nothing but not really hitting a sweet spot. [Disclosure: One of them was me.] Then Altavista launched and it was clearly better than anything else. Meanwhile, Larry and Sergey were at Stanford thinking about transitive functions over the graph of Web hyperlinks. Maybe. To me it feels more like commercial software development in the early 80s. There were a bunch of platforms (C64, PC, Apple II, etc), none of which was a clear winner, software had to be written twice to work on two different systems. People talk about lock in, but seemingly mostly in the context of getting their data back out when they're done. I'm particularly interested in watching how the space commoditizes (hmm, the red bars tell me that's not a word). Over and over we've seen markets converge on one or a small few standards -- I think we're some distance from seeing that here. I think it's too early still to put any guesses on how it might standardize yet.