Investor Dan Gordon produced a thoughtful piece this week on the future of the internet or, more specifically, the looming possibility of the long-heralded “world computer.” We are, as Gordon suggests, in the midst of a “transition from isolated computers that send data to one another over networks to a highly integrated worldwide computing fabric that distributes computation, storage, and data movement seamlessly, dynamically, and automatically without (much regard) to geography.”

In his musings on how long the full transition to a world computer will take and how the process will unfold, Gordon puts forth some rather interesting ideas, not the least of which is the fact that an explosion in cloud computing is central. Interestingly, he also suggests that as clouds grow to encompass more of our computing tasks, both personal and large-scale, geography is going to be more important than ever.

“There will be regional clouds based on minimum latencies and possibly some kinds of regional specialization. So, we might have an East Coast North America cloud with some specializations in financial and security ops…There might be a supply-chain cloud based in Taiwan or China. There might be an entertainment/media cloud based in LA.”

Further on the speculative front, Gordon says that for now, many customers outside of early adopters in cloud are not seeing the full value of cloud because the solution is not yet complete—or completely presented. There will need to be some niche from which all other appliances feed and that cloud appliance will branch out to bring cloud to a wider number of users if it can be demonstrated as the total package or complete solution. 

As someone who places bets in technology for a living, Gordon’s ideas about the more rapid than expected “cloud-i-zation” provide a glimpse into the future from the perspective of someone whose livelihood depends on outpacing the earliest adopters. This is a short must-read for the week. 

Full story at Internet Evolution