What Tim O'Reilly Gets Wrong About the Cloud

Technology publisher and Web 2.0 impresario Tim O’Reilly wrote a thought-provoking post today about the dynamics of the nascent cloud computing business. He makes some important and valid points, but his analysis is also flawed, and the flaws of his argument are as revealing as its strengths.

O’Reilly begins by taking issue with Hugh MacLeod’s contention that, thanks to “power laws,” “a single company may possibly emerge to dominate The Cloud, the way Google (GOOG) came to dominate Search, the way Microsoft (MSFT) came to dominate Software. … We’re potentially talking about a multi-trillion dollar company. Possibly the largest company to have ever existed.”

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