For venture capitalists the Cloud means “no more having to build one data center per startup!” In short, the Cloud is a profit center, not an IT cost center. So said Peter Fingar as we talked about his newest book Dot.Cloud: the 21st Century Business Platform. Peter has spent 30+ years working at the intersection of business and technology as a former CIO and professor of business information systems.

Peter’s work is thoughtful and provocative in the way he describes the impact of information technology on business. Peter and I have collaborated on projects, and because we both write about business and technology, we sometimes find our books competing with each other for readers’ attention. Yet, as Peter puts it, “I think of you as a colleague, a kindred soul, because our books only reinforce the need for more... e.g., Sears and JC Penney in the same mall reinforce one another.” I cite Peter's books in my books and at times I come across something he wrote that is so insightful and so to the point that all I can say is, “Wow, I wish I had written that.”

MICHAEL H: Peter what motivated you to write this book when cloud computing is not yet full formed as an idea and has yet to be fully defined?
PETER F: Sure. I wrote Dot.Cloud because I felt like it needed to be written for business people, and I was one of the people who might be qualified to do so. This book is not a technical treatment of Cloud Computing. It is, instead, about the implications of an emerging business platform and what it portends for businesses that want to survive and thrive in the 21st century. Cloud Computing will transform how we access information, share content, and interact. Cloud Computing could change the economics of business, allowing companies to adapt and scale their business models and markets.

MH: What’s your explanation of cloud computing?
PF: In its essence, Cloud Computing is about using swarms of computers to deliver unprecedented computing power to people and organizations across the globe. Many advances in Cloud Computing have come from researchers taking on the challenges posed by Internet searches (Google’s MapReduce and the open-source Hadoop systems). In everyday terminology, cloud computing uses sophisticated tools to harness the Internet to: 1) spread computing tasks across multiple clusters of machines; 2) provide a Web 2.0 platform for new tools and techniques; 3) provide a platform for human collaboration; and 4) make all the world’s information accessible anywhere.

MH: What’s so new about cloud computing? Isn’t this just another name for On-Demand, Grid Computing, and SaaS?
PF: The economic and innovation implications of the Cloud are game changing, for technology will not only be available to handle the world’s business and financial transactions, but will also open a whole new world of human interaction and collaboration on a scale never before possible. In the past, information technology was about productivity; now it’s about collaboration, a shared information base, the wisdom of crowds, and collective intelligence. Cloud computing will take globalization to a whole new level, and globalization is indeed the greatest reorganization of the world since the Industrial Revolution. One shared world; one shared computer; one shared information base.

In short, Web 1.0 was “read-only,” Web 2.0 is “read-write,” and Web 3.0 will be “intelligent read-write-execute”—in the Cloud.

(MH comment: See Kevin Kelly video “Predicting the Next 5,000 Days of the Web”; he talks about “The One” and describes it like this: “There is only

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