John’s post about The Cloud made interesting reading.

In order to discuss some of the issues surrounding The Cloud concept, I think it is important to place it in historical context, looking at the Cloud’s forerunners and the problems they encountered before being adopted.

On my blog, http://www.KeystonesAndRivets.com, I’ve tried to do that in my “Cloud Computing” post.

One of the current barriers in the way of The Cloud is economics. I argue that,

“Telecom prices have fallen and bandwidth has increased, but more slowly than processing power, leaving the economics worse than in 2003″.

And “I’m sure that advances will appear over the coming years to bring us closer, but at the moment there are too many issues and costs with network traffic and data movements to allow it to happen for all but select processor intensive applications, such as image rendering and finite modelling.”

Comments and feedback are very welcome.

Regards

PJW