Google CIO Ben Fried Says Cloud Tipping Point Is At Hand
Wall Street Journal
The economics of cloud computing are driving down the cost structure of business so far and so fast that it’s scary, Google CIO Ben Fried says. “It deeply disturbed me … in 2006, 2007 consumer companies were forcing efficiencies on a scale never seen before,” Fried said Thursday during remarks at the Bloomberg Link Enterprise Technology Summit in New York. At the time, Fried was working in the technology group at investment bank Morgan Stanley, where he was a managing director of application infrastructure, in charge of software development, electronic commerce and knowledge worker productivity. In 2008, he left the bank and headed to Google, which was at the heart of the disruption that was emanating from the consumer market and beginning to spread through the business world.
Workers, accustomed to using free and simple tools such as Google Apps, Skype, Flickr and iTunes for their personal affairs, now wanted to use those cloud-based software tools at work. And CIOs and other technology executives were beginning to let them, and to experiment themselves with those services.
