OSCON 2010: Simon Wardley, "Situation Normal, Everything Must Change"

[mikepousti]

i dont understand the video

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Oxford students coined the term "soccer", not the States.

[mootpointer]

Is there a chance of getting up to date slides for the keynote? I found old ones, but I really enjoyed the ones used for this presentation.

[simonwardley]

Dear jjpcondor ... [continuing]... so whilst I agree with you that the term had earlier origins, in terms of the presentation it would not materially benefit it to get into such a discussion. Especially, since whilst the link to Sombart is generally accepted, the link to other writers is not. I could easily fill up half an hour on a discussion of commoditisation vs commodification - whilst interesting, it wouldn't benefit the audience greatly.

[simonwardley]

Dear jjpcondor. Schumpeter is strongly associated "creative destruction" which he popularised in "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy". You are correct its origins date from the work of Werner Sombart which some argue (debatable) was influenced by Nietzsche and earlier. Rather than get into a discourse of Sivowitches law - "whenever you find who was first, the harder you look you'll find someome who is more first" - I found it more productive to use the most strongly associated name.

[jjpcondor]

Wrong: Not A. Schumpeter.

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who reintroduced the concept of CREATIVE DESTRUCTION!

He was inspired by Shiva - the destroyer of the world, following Brahma the creator and Vishnu the preserver, after which Brahma again creates the world and so on. Shiva is responsible for change both in the form of death and destruction and in the positive sense of the shedding of old habits.

[SandersAK]

I'd be curious to see or hear about the shock of the new- what sort of requirements are needed (cultural shifts inside a corporation) to make the leap to the cloud.

And in terms of payoff - we always discuss financial reasons, but where are the clear cut innovative advantages to cloud?

The electricity analogy works to a certain extent, but I think it can be taken further, where utility-like frameworks push what is possible. Now I can ask a dev. to do what I want, not just update / bugfix ;)

[simonwardley]

Dear RonJohn63. Obviously there was only limited time and so I couldn't go through every detail. It is true that there are certain constraints which will cause a commodity to only be provided as a physical item rather than through a service. This is why the diagram shows the box as commodity and circles a domain for utility services. In the case of computing resources, the physical constraints do not exist and hence a utility service is possible.

[RonJohn63]

The flaw in the Cloud hypothesis is that there are a lot of commoditized products that people (and businesses) still buy and keep "at home".

Photocopiers and refrigerators are two examples.