Security, certification, and Cloud Computing

[Rich Braun]

Jerry Natowitz <j.natowitz-KealBaEQdz4 at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I was speaking with someone who suggested I look
> into getting into "The Next Big Thing". ?She said she'd bet her money on
> Cloud Computing.

David Hummel <lemmuh-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>FWIW, "cloud computing" is for the most part an over-hyped marketing
> term.  It's shared hosting with lots of machines that have lots of
>VMs running.

When I was a 12-year-old, I was a little too curious.  Emptied out the
contents of a model-rocket engine onto a patch of dirt, took out a match and
lit it.  (It's gunpowder, dummy!)  The firewall took out my eyelashes and all
the other little hairs growing on me.

Then when I was a 33-year-old, I also got a little curious about the Next Big
Thing.  Started up an Internet company, told all my friends it'd be a
trillion-dollar industry, they all decided I must have grown three heads.  But
it did turn into an industry that size, as--just like I predicted--every
company in the world decided they had to pile on.  All at once, basically, a
couple years too late for me.  It blew up in my face just as surely as that
rocket engine 20 years earlier.

When building a career, you want controlled ignition, not the Next Big Thing.

Just my $0.02.  I think Cloud Computing is going to ultimately amount to
exactly as much opportunity (zero) for the Little Guy as fiber-optics turned
out to be 10 years ago.  This is basically a way for Big Business to control a
big chunk of the market, and surely they will succeed.  No question, it's a
next Big Thing.  But don't bet your career on making money on it unless your
ambition is to join a big company and then get laid off a year or three later.

-rich