Abstract: Network effects are powerful and scary.
The clouds just keep rolling in. Microsoft has thrown their hat in the ring with Azure which deserves notice because Ray Ozzie is behind it. Amazon just released a CDN service. With recent coverage in The Economist and every major newspaper, even my local news tonight, cloud computing appears to be here to stay, judging by the marketing feeding frenzy.
There have been some recent well publicized outages that have generated some concerned opinion. Something struck a related chord when I read an excellent interview by Stephen Strogatz about network effects in Seed magazine:
I have this general concern about entering this networked era, which we’re clearly already in. For example, the power grid used to not be a grid. It was just a lot of isolated power stations. When there was trouble people would just close down the power plants and repair whatever the problem was.
But now that there’s a grid, when something bad happens at one point in the grid, and you use the defense strategy of just shutting down that plant, it can have propagating effects. It can put too much load on other plants, which may cause them to shut down. And this is exactly what we saw here in the northeast when we had the 2003 blackout. Or think about what is happening right now in the market, where there are all kinds of propagating, cascading failures in our market and financial systems. So, I’m just thinking that you may be opening a Pandora’s Box
