The Big Switch

And prospective customers had practical concerns as well: How reliable would the service be? Would it disappear, along with their data, should Salesforce go out of business? Would it be fast enough? Would they be able to customize it? What would happen if they lost their Internet connection? And what about the security of their information? If it w

At the close of the 1960s, the average American company devoted less than 10 percent of its capital equipment budget to information technology.

Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, and dating sites like PlentyOfFish, are essentially agglomerations of the creative, unpaid contributions of their members.

Part 2 Living in the Cloud We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. —John M. Culkin

If companies can rely on central stations like Google’s to fulfill all or most of their computing requirements, they’ll be able to slash the money they spend on their own hardware and software—and all the dollars saved are ones that would have gone into the coffers of Microsoft and the other tech giants.

even the basic building blocks of computing—data storage, data processing, data transmission—can be broken up into different services supplied from different locations by different companies.

General purpose technologies, or GPTs, are best thought of not as discrete tools

By 2000, in other words, the average US company was investing almost as much cash into computer systems as into all other types of equipment combined.

Virtualized systems that are shared by many companies are often referred to by computer professionals as “multi-tenant systems.”