In this third of a five-part review of cloud computing and its likely developments, Leslie Willcocks, Will Venters and Edgar Whitley of the London School of Economics focus on the likely impacts that cloud will have on buyers and providers of services.
The authors argue that cloud is subject to the First Law of Technology: that we invariably overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies while underestimating their long-term effects.
Cloud’s impacts are likely to emerge more slowly and over a much longer time period, in part, because technical innovations typically go through three phases: invention, commercialization and diffusion. Cloud is still predominantly in the second phase.