Future of Cloud Computing

Answer 1

1. Lower costs of market entry / application deployment, faster payback on development costs, and superior return on investment will make cloud-based platforms the target of choice for both entrepreneurial and enterprise developers.

2. Mainstream consumers will become more aggressive in lowering their cost of both personal and business computing, and will become far more accepting of lightweight client machines running free and open-source operating systems and applications -- including application-oriented internet clients like Google's Chrome.

3. The generation raised on broadband connections, Google search and Facebook community membership will not fear to rely on Web-delivered applications and resources for both work and leisure.

4. Companies will redefine the "C" in "CRM" to mean "Community" rather than "Customer": they will build systems that engage their partners and customers in cooperative processes of product and service improvement, rather than building only inward-looking systems for in-house analysis of the world outside the company's wall.

5. Developers outside the U.S. and Europe -- specifically those in India, China and Brazil -- will find their most rapidly growing opportunities in their own home markets, and will shift their focus toward building high-value applications for compatriot companies rather than providing low-cost labor to mature markets overseas.

6. Software market cycles will rapidly accelerate to Web speed, with multiple releases per year, rather than the glacial pace of multi-year upgrade cycles that currently results in most IT sites running legacy versions of cumbersome bloatware.

7. Global growth in development demand will increase the importance of high-leverage application frameworks that enable more rapid development of higher-quality products.

8. Too many development teams will minimize short-term pain, rather than maximizing gain, and will find themselves made irrelevant by teams that kept pace with new opportunities.

Answer 2

Cloud computing is so new that predicting what it will look like in the future is somewhat difficult, but it is certain to grow in popularity when the advantages it offers are considered. Eliminating bulky hard drives from mobile computing devices saves weight, giving device manufacturers the opportunity to pack more and more features into a smaller package, at a lower cost, while at the same time increasing reliability and battery life. Look for cloud computing to dominate the mobile productivity workplace.