The Cloud – Another dot com bust in the making?

It is a proven fact that the better part of 98% of all businesses will fail within 5 years of inception. As part of our marketing strategy here at Sklar we don’t advertise or market to businesses that haven’t been in business for at least 5 years for this very reason. Another proven fact is that technology has a life cycle, typically 3-5 years. I mentioned this in a previous post “The Cloud – Will I save money?” that as stated in the book ,“Inside the Tornado” by Geoffrey Moore, all technology has a predictable life cycle and WILL commoditize. So if we are already about 1-2 years into this “Cloud” technology (hosted providers have actually been around for several years) we should start to see a sharp commodization in just a couple more or probably sooner. I argue that the process has already started and just as Cloud provider finish creating their offering they will be shutting down at the same time.

When this starts to happen, and it will, how will it impact your business? Will you suddenly have an issue of dealing with your provider going under. What if they have your data and you can’t get it back. This message is repetitive from previous posts but could it actually be more like what we saw a decade ago when we saw the “dot com bust“. I’m not sure it will be that serious but I’m certain there are going to be serious issues as the commodization process begins.

Two choices… take your chances and wait and see or keep your assets in your possession and play it safe. Considering the benefits of moving your data to the cloud really hold no incredible value I think the choice is obvious.