Comments on: Building Apps in a Cloud World

By: marksuster

marksuster — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:01:13 +0000

Thanks, Matt. I agree – people should give Cloud a shot. But history tells me corporates will move more slowly.

By: Matthew Small

Matthew Small — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:33:55 +0000

Great post Mark. I would also agree that there is still a lot of education required but really, I would encourage your readers to try things out in the cloud. It costs users nothing to next-to-nothing to test a few servers and get their feet wet. The thing that shocks me the most is that there is all this buzz about the cloud but 80-90% of the “buzzers” have never even tried it. What are they waiting for?

RightScale has a 100% free edition of the platform and all you need to do with an IaaS provider is put in your credit card. Just remember to “turn the lights off” when you’re done.

By: Alicia@BlueLock

Alicia@BlueLock — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:15:17 +0000

Yes, well the good thing is that conversations are getting easier, there’s still a lot of education going on in the sales process, but from what we’re seeing I think the shift is on its way and soon!

By: marksuster

marksuster — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:11:44 +0000

Thank you, Alicia. It reminds me of SaaS circa 2001 where we had to evangelize a lot in our sales process. The big corporate buyers we cautious and nimbler start-ups used the technology. I’m convinced corporate computing power will shift to the Cloud – the bigger question is when!

By: Alicia@BlueLock

Alicia@BlueLock — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:01:33 +0000

As an active participant in the cloud computing industry, we are seeing very similar trends. Through most of 2008 we spent a large amount of our sales effort directed at education. In 2009, we have seen a significant shift as the awareness of cloud computing has grown and individuals are more interested in how they can leverage the cloud. More discussions are focused around when they will shift and what they will shift to the cloud, rather than if they will shift.

By: marksuster

marksuster — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:33:43 +0000

Interesting blog post, thanks.

By: David

David — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:10:01 +0000

Thanks Mark, I knew about Zuora, but not Vindicia.

This is perhaps not the place to expound these views, but (briefly) I think most subscription models create too much user friction and apprehension.

I blogged here on the problems with subscriptions (within the context of freemium) and why pure cloud-style usage billing makes more sense.

By: marksuster

marksuster — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:36:33 +0000

Thanks for catching the typo. re: Cloud style billing, not 100% which type of billing you refer to but there are a host of really good new Cloud Billing applications including Zuora and Vendicia.

By: David

David — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:07:31 +0000

Great post. The next logical step would be to bring cloud-style billing to the client-side. People seem naturally inclined to pay a reasonable sum for what they use in the cloud, so why not in the browser too?

BTW, you have a small typo: “Nicolas Carr got things mostly write…”