[LaserJock]

“Why the push to centralize to cloud locations rather than remaining distributed?”

I’ll claim ignorance here, but I thought “the cloud” was the definition of distributed computing and data management.

Various futurists have been arguing that the value of data is rapidly approaching zero during this age of accelerating change and ubiquitous information access. Put another way, the half life of a good idea is getting shorter and shorter. Business models based on husbanding data as if it has value (the crown jewels) are going to fade away and be replaced by business models built on the concept of exploiting new and publicly available data more rapidly than your peers.

I fear that if these predictions are true, the U.S. government and its love of classified data will fail to compete with faster governments not married to protecting mountains of information or data. Many of our larger businesses could follow suit.

We live in interesting times.

[willyd]

You are exactly correct...the value of data is plummeting. As we trend towards perfect information, it seems like markets will begin to correct instantly almost removing short term profit takers and liquidity from the markets.

As consumers increasingly use engines like amazon and google products, retailers will continue to die off and the profit model will continue to be destroyed.

I don’t know where it all ends. Combine this with the automation trend it seems we in a negative feedback loop that doesn’t have an obvious solution. I don’t know what happens when there are just no jobs and no ways for 80% of the population to make any money.

[so_real]

The way it was explained to me, is that the cloud is everywhere. You put your data in the cloud, and it is stored on any number of physical machines, in any number of countries, so you never have to worry about a disk failure losing it, or a segment of the network going down making it unavailable. That sounds great until you wonder who has access to it. Do you really want your competitors to know who your vendors are? the names of your most productive sales people? the target objectives for your next sales campaign or media blitz? etc, etc. I don't have a problem with library and audio visual material being ubiquitous. But there are just some things better kept under lock and key.