The Big Dimmer Switch - Init

<body> <h1>The Big Dimmer Switch</h1> <div class="ch9 intro"><p>Today, we're introducing Vector. It's a blog about developers, platform, and big ideas/trends in tech, but with a little bit different bent on what folks are used to from Channel 9...</p><p>It's been eight years since Channel 9 first introduced many of our key engineering folks to the developer community to deliver a transparent view into how we think about the technologies we're working on, the teams doing the work, and the huge community of people in and around Microsoft that are connected to all of it. None of that changes ... the team continues to produce the great content that has personified Channel 9 since 2004. But we're also going to spend some time on a more 'elevated' view of what we're thinking when it comes to our own strategy, our competitors, broad-based industry stuff, and of course the intersection of all of this with business. Sometimes it'll be topical, other times it will just offer commentary on something that people are talking about. We will also have guest posters talking about what they're doing that fits in this vein.</p><p>So that brings us to an actual post on something meaningful ... the disruptive impact of the services model on businesses.</p><p>- The Channel 9 Team</p></div><p>In 2007, Nick Carr published "<a href="http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/">The Big Switch</a>," which chronicles the evolution of electricity from being locally-generated by businesses on their factory floors to something we all now consume as a pay-for-what-you-use utility. The book draws parallels between electricity and packaged software as a means to offer up a potential end-state for cloud computing, hence the title ... <span class="pullQuoteSource">there will be, the book asserts, a switchover from in-house datacenters to software delivered as a utility, and it's just a matter of time</span>. It's a good book, not steeped in technical jargon but rather a set of thoughtful mappings between these two eerily similar eras of technology disruption.</p><p>Nearly five years have gone by since it was first published, and a lot has happened (and not happened) relative to the pace of cloud adoption ... we know a lot more about what motivates companies to push some apps out the door and into public clouds in a hurry, while other apps will take their time, or maybe even continue to run on-premises in so-called private cloud environments. So it begs a bunch of questions: What is the end state for the services disruption? Is it public cloud platforms and SaaS, or a hybrid of public and private cloud deployments, combined with traditional IT? In other words, is the big switch actually more of a dimmer switch, in the sense that it's not just a simple matter of on/off? Are there any other historical lessons or examples of disruption we can draw insight from?</p><hr><p>Disruption is a great word ... if you talk to enough developers, IT folks, and industry pundits about services, "disruption" shows up as by far the most-used and (IMO) best descriptor for what's happening in computing today. Scenarios that used to be impractical, uneconomical, and just plain impossible are now fair game for developers to build and deliver, all because of increasingly cheap and abundant resources like compute, storage, and bandwidth, available at scale and on a pay-as-you-go basis. So when people talk about disruption, the shape of its impact on the market is generally assumed by most folks to be one of outright replacement, such as the advent of electricity as a utility, the combustion engine's replacement of the horse-drawn carriage, and digital media's disruption of physical media, to name a few - basically, the end state in which the disruptive technology means buggy-whip obsolescence for the existing technology. But not all disruptions play out this way, and there are more than a few historical examples, my personal favorite being the captivating story of the microwave business. Seriously, it's </body>