I just came across an interesting BusinessWeek article, "How Cloud Computing Will Change Business," that describes how businesses are becoming acutely aware of economical benefits of cloud computing and are keenly interested in leveraging the current consumer and social network experience.

Horoscopes and fortunetellers notwithstanding, it is always fascinating to hear people predict the future. Particularly when those making the predictions are world-famous scientists, business executives and investors.

The Birth of the Universal Computing Platform

The Yankee Group is predicting a four trillion dollar market for the "Anywhere IT" computing paradigm.   What is this new paradigm?  Specifically, "The Anywhere Network" will automatically make the following decisions for users:

As pointed out by Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer, the clock is ticking for telecom providers to jump on the cloud computing bandwagon. Cloud computing is quickly evolving and offers telecom operators a unique opportunity to deliver all types of new services bundled with broadband connectivity -- everything from netbooks and virtualized desktops to private cloud services.

George Crump's recent blog post for InformationWeek notes, "Data is always at risk. No matter if it's in the cloud, on your servers and especially on your user's laptops."

According to a report by market research firm Harris/Decima, "an upcoming generation of young professionals raised on technology and liberal personal computing is putting an unprecedented strain on companies already faced with the threat of security breaches and an increasingly competitive recruiting environment."

Ever since Microsoft blamed netbooks for some of its troubles, there has been no shortage of opinions on this new device's disruptive effect on the PC, software and semiconductor businesses.

Charles Babcock's recent InformationWeek article, "Virtualization Set for Desktop Surge In 2009," and the respective reader commentary that followed got me thinking. As noted, server consolidation with VMware has provided a huge opportunity for IT shops to consolidate applications with different dependencies onto shared systems while maintaining operational isolation.

No, I am not suggesting refugee status for administration appointees, rather I am reflecting on the benefits that could be achieved if the Obama administration went to stateless computing.  It seems like a good fit since Barack Obama was the first presidential candidate to wholeheartedly embrace the Internet and social media for fundraising and networking.  These tools, especially Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, were instrumental in successfully engaging and communicating with diverse audiences throughout the campaign.