I helped build WiFi, and WAY BACK THEN (~6 years ago) my kids were young. I could walk with them through any electronics store - Best Buy, CompUSA, Radio Shack etc - and point at what I did. “Our chips are in that, and that, and that”. It was very cool, and I was a hero to my kids and their friends. Wireless was (and still is) some VERY cool stuff! If you love your WiFi, throw me, and a very talented group of engineers some love!
Now I do Cloud Computing - it is very hard to point at something and have my kids understand exactly what I build. I could not even bring them into our data center and point at a machine that one of my domains runs at. There is no “machine”. There are thousands of machines. (And even as the Director of Software Development I don;t have the credentials to get into our datacenters - I don’t need to be there).
What I build is hard to point at - much more difficult than a Wireless enabled laptop, or a WiFi Router.
But I am building something even larger than WiFi. Imagine that - larger than WiFi! Think of it - where were you last in a decent sized city and you couldn’t find free WiFi somewhere?
It is everywhere, And I am helping to build something even bigger, but different.
And struggling with how I explain it to people. Even my kids.
We went through this with Wireless - where people just didn’t get it - until they used it. Cloud computing is kinda like that. You don’t know that you want it (yet). In a year you will be pissed when you can’t get it.
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