Microsoft: Cloud will fluff 14 million jobs by 2015

For a sufficiently small value of 'cloud'

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'

If I put a managed web server into colocation, is that a 'cloud'? If I use salesforce.com in the office, is that a 'cloud'? Does anyone understand WTF they're talking about (of course not, they're in Marketing)?

Slightly optimistic

Over a period of fours years that relates to about 9600 being created "every single day". I am sure that even the governments have difficulty arriving at the level of optimism.

Cloud computing is good for some companies but not all, any business critical cannot rely on the cloud. Fully redundnant Internet links are too expensie for most companies, secondary backup locations are out of the question. So outside of the larger corporations, who already use data centres, who is the intended audience ?

14 Million jobs is a large figure without some very concrete facts..

Was this by any chance released just in time for an upcoming shareholders meeting ?

Either my geography is poor.....

.... or MS have no clue where Sweden actually is.

P.

Their slide has an error..

It would seem that someone has mistakenly put cloud data centers outside of India on that graphic. The real picture should show the clouds existing only in 3rd world countries. Notice how even with the stupid biased graphic, a lot of 1st world countries aren't even in the triple digits.

As far as advancement goes, there will be less. In the "cloud", the customer owns nothing, and pays continuously for services. Why would a OS company spend profits to make a product better, when you have no choice in the first place. How often do you "upgrade" your dog's food from "crunchy pellets" to steak tips? You know he will eat "crunchy pellets", why spend the extra money on steak tips. How often does your company change it's whole infrastructure from one OS to another, a la Windows to Apple, never, and the vendors know it. Once you are using their cloud services your machines will not work without their cloud based services, period, your choice will be pay them what they want, or have no software, there will be no more "sticking with what we have", as you "have" nothing There are still small businesses running XP, if their software was cloud based, they would still be paying month to month for that OS, just one more fee for something that could have been paid for a decade ago. I mean, do you rent your microwave? No, you know you will need one forever, so you buy one.

It will make manufacturing jobs at first for servers, switches, and harddrives (in 3rd world countries).

It will make "tech" jobs in 3rd world countries.

It will take tech jobs from 1st world countries (much like Temp Tech-Repair agencies take away permanent IT positions in companies now).

It will screw up internet traffic, and we all know that the pipe owners would rather loose a limb then upgrade their pipes. They will slice it up as much as they can, and leave the smallest part for non-commercial users (ie. caps, speed limits).

It will increase company IP theft (it's hard to break into a company and steal data, it's easy to payoff a night-shift tech in Malaysia to walk over to Rack #3451 and copy Company A's data to an external).

It will create weird political situations where a coup in one country cuts a company in an other off from it's data.

Whole companies will just "lose" everything every now and again, "it 's tragic, it shouldn't have happened, there should have been safeguards", but it will happen.

Whole companies could be shutdown by DOS attacks, not just their ability to shop at Amazon, but their ability to run "Office-365" and do actual work.

Computer hardware will stagnate as the bottleneck at the network level will set the pace for other components. "My harddrive is 15K rpm!" So, who cares, ALL data comes from the network at 100mb (ok 1G if your spiffy).

No one takes care of your kids better than you, and the same holds true for your data.