"When Amazon’s EC2 and S3 web services arrived in 2006, they changed the computing business. Big server makers — most noticeably Sun Microsystems — had been tinkering with the idea of selling computer power in much the same way that utility companies sell power or water, but much to everyone’s surprise, Amazon — a seller of books and CDs — managed to produce a set of services that the market was willing to pay for."
Tracking those words a little further back, I found this 2004 snippet:
"Peter Gassner, Salesforce.com. Build or buy? No, subscribe. On-demand utility. Chief electricity officer was once a real position." ( http://www.jaycross.com/wp/category/just-jay/page/130/ ), besides Nicholas Carr and others elaborations of similar vintage.
The ideas were definitely in the air, the problem was execution and delivery.
Funny to see how frequently the word "grid" is sprinkled into that blog post. Now we use "cloud" the same way. It illustrates how silly the industry gets about using/abusing whatever the latest buzzword is.
First off, in some areas it is a regulated market which would prevent them from being able to do so (electricity at least). Second, it would be very expensive for very little gain. It wouldn't scale well and they would have a ton of new infrastructure to support.
On top of that, they would have to compete with companies who already have customers. The electricity market has recently become unregulated in Illinois, and despite being able to save money using a different provider, I haven't switched from ComEd. The reason is that the savings isn't enough for me to justify the time spent actually comparing and seeing if I save and then switching providers. Amazon would be up against this same kind of apathy, which would only occur after they get some sort of infrastructure up and going. Meaning they would have sunk capital into a business for nothing.
This reminded me of the Jonathan Schwartz (Sun's CEO) blog mentioning "Chief Electricity Officers" - I tracked down this archived copy of the March 2006 post: http://web.archive.org/web/20060720095546/http://blogs.sun.c...
Tracking those words a little further back, I found this 2004 snippet: "Peter Gassner, Salesforce.com. Build or buy? No, subscribe. On-demand utility. Chief electricity officer was once a real position." ( http://www.jaycross.com/wp/category/just-jay/page/130/ ), besides Nicholas Carr and others elaborations of similar vintage.
The ideas were definitely in the air, the problem was execution and delivery.