Help Debuking Expensive Cloud Hype @ Taiwan
By HUNG Chao-Kuei on Saturday, May 22 2010, 21:44 - Permalink
Recently in Taiwan, there is an unsubstantiated hype around cloud computing which claims to be able to produce one trillion (10^12) dollars worth of output value with 24 billion (2.4*10^10) dollars investment from the government. (Numbers are in NT dollars.) I am not completely against cloud computing; but such numbers are ridiculous when most of my colleagues (ICT professors) can't even take good advantage of wiki. It smells badly of corporate greed exploiting public ignorance while feeding on government resources. The most intriguing part is that it does not seem to come from google, the first cloud company one would think of. The major force behind the hypes seems to come from some much bigger company based at Redmond, which does not look like a cloud company to me. Thus I write an article (see link at end) for the general public to understand cloud computing using wiki as an example.
[Above image: Microsoft and Taiwanese Government to cooperatively develop the cloud computing market. Head of Legislative Yuan and Head of Ministry of Economy are among those in the picture.]
I need your help to polish the points made here. I trust my FS fellows, both in terms of knowledge and good will, much better than the ICT (Information and Computer Technology) professors in Taiwan who might come forward as self-appointed cloud specialists while serving as corporate salesmen selling questionable commodities. In fact I expect that this article might eventually be challenged by the latter group since it will help the consumers see the absurdity of such extreme costs in a technology that was claimed to save people money. It is also a good opportunity to introduce wiki as both a piece of FS and a successful way for the FS community, and free culture community in general, to cooperate globally. An additional benefit is to leverage the cloud hype against Microsoft's Office 2010, which might otherwise force the patent-encumbered docx's way into the public through their ignorance.
So please bear with me. I will switch to the boring mode for the non-FS, non-ICT-trained readers in the main article "Wiki As an Example to Demystify Cloud Computing". Please leave your suggestions for improvement there. Thank you!
Comments
The original page on the government site mysteriously disappeared along with its images when I check this article again today. Fortunately there are other copies floating around. I got one copy from here and make a partial snapshot just in case something strange happens.
10^12/2.4*10^10 = 100/2.4 = 41.67 , the businsess is very cost-effective for gov but M$ will announce tw is a new colony of cloud computing.
台灣如果不用ms的 azure , 以台灣軟體業界真的有能力發展 cloud computing platform ? ....
微軟標得美國政府最大雲端服務案 http://www.ithome.com.tw/itadm/arti...
Google控告美國政府採購合約獨厚微軟 http://www.ithome.com.tw/itadm/arti...
台灣軟體業界可以選邊站.
can we try to do it by ourselves ? get some free open source cloud computing platforms , such as eyeOS , hadoop , redhat's clould ,Nimbus , .... maybe it can save many dollars ... this time , microsoft will obtain a huge business. :-)
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