Inflection Points
Although the articles on adamalthus.com represent my personal views on the intersection of technology, policy and economics I rarely write about the personal im...
Category: Economics
Cloud Computing’s Free Lunch
One of my mother’s favortite sayings is “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” Generally that’s a pretty good rule to live buy. If it looks like your being off...
Amazon/Cloud/Competition/CompSci/Economics/Futures/Google/internet/Microsoft/Networks/Platforms/Strategy/Uncategorized
Is there a ‘can’ in your future?
In the economics of computing the most expensive resource is still the network. In scenarios where large data-sets are being processed it is almost always cheap...
Cloud Computing and Complexity
The business of Information Technology (IT) has a complexity problem. As a domain IT requires deeply specialized skills, the language of IT is arcane and busine...
Why There’s No Future in Cloud Futures
An interesting debate took place at last week’s Cloud2020 gathering regarding the viability of futures markets for cloud computing capacity. I’m fir...
The Composable Enterprise
We have witnessed a major shift over recent decades towards a digital services based economy[1]. Exponential growth in the power of information technology enhan...
The Laws of Platform Economics
The economic evolution of computing platforms appears to be guided by a number of ‘Laws’ that are independent of any specific underlying technology....
Apple/Cloud/Competition/CompSci/Economics/Futures/Intel/internet/Microsoft/Networks/Oracle/Platforms/Strategy
Economics and Platform Architecture (Part 3)
Part 2 of this series of articles looked at how transitioning from scarcity to an abundance of fundamental computing resources enabled the historic one-to-one r...
Apple/Cloud/Competition/CompSci/Economics/Futures/Intel/internet/Microsoft/Networks/Oracle/Platforms/Uncategorized
Economics and Platform Architecture (Part 2)
Part I in this series of articles outlined the impact that the economics of scarcity has had on both software architectures and the structure of the computer in...