Adeline的economist阅读分析帖

Rose@MayUID：2797727

啊哈哈，蛋疼GG辛苦了，我分应该够了。。。今天没碰到说一个小时只能发三个贴的情况。。。

不过还是要验证哪。。。继续养。。。嗯。。。

AdelineShenUID：2630498

赞辰辰...乃确实也很辛苦，嗯...

AdelineShenUID：2630498

哎。。。又无心学习了。。。

一天不做完实验，一天没心情好好学习。。。

神哪。。。

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Information overload

This house believes that if the promise of technology is to simplify our world, it is failing.

About this debate:

Technology users are discovering that the proliferation of information tools, services, and channels makes managing their own personal and professional information increasingly difficult. A growing chorus of voices is sounding the alarm that information overload is diminishing people’s ability be effective. Are there better ways to manage the vast amounts of information assaulting users on a daily basis? What is the right balance between new tools and information streams, on the one hand, and minimizing the impact of information overload on the other? Are people losing their ability to reflect rather than just react?

AdelineShenUID：2630498

The moderator's opening remarks

Our first debate in this series involved a vital area of public policy. For this second debate the focus is firmly on the individual, and the impact of technology on our lives. The question at hand should make us all examine our own use of technology, and perhaps produce surprising answers.
We all use technology. Everyone reading or taking part in this debate is of course connected to the internet. For that, at least, let us be thankful.
But even as it opens up extraordinary new possibilities, is technology making our lives too complicated? I am able to write this opening statement far away from my desk, courtesy of wireless connectivity, on a hotel veranda overlooking the English Channel on a Sunday morning: miraculous simplicity! Yet my wife, whose birthday we are celebrating here, may view it differently: an unfortunate complication of her special day. This debate is about a question many of us grapple with on a daily basis.
Two dimensions of the issue emerge from the thoughtful opening statements. First, Richard Szafranski, a partner at Toffler Associates, raises the broad impact of technology on our environment: its contribution to global warming, the creation of new chemical compounds with uncertain impact on life and health, the invention of weapons of mass destruction. Surely, he argues, such things complicate our lives.
Second, and more palpably, there is the matter of the breakneck development of personal technology. Mr Szafranski argues that the abundance of this stuff is such that we suffer from "over-choice" as well as "surplus complexity": all those ring tones to choose from and personal devices to be baffled by. Far from simplifying our lives, choosing between so many options is hard and increasingly complicated work.
John Maeda, president elect of the Rhode Island School of Design, accepts that technology can add complexity to our lives, and we can all empathise with tales of maddening computer crashes and infuriating printer glitches. But, he claims, it also has the capacity to remove even greater complexity that existed beforehand: who wouldn't grapple with a fidgety hearing-aid if in the end it overcomes deafness?. Furthermore, he believes, we are tech "explorers", experimenting and adapting technologies to our needs over time: he raises the prospect that we are entering a time of simplification, a "Renaissance of design-led development." In short, "the bad rap given to technologies today will be only temporary."
Where does the balance lie? That is what I hope this debate will clarify. Mr Maeda reckons there is 90% upside and 10% downside; Mr Szafranski, without putting a number on it, thinks it's the other way around. What do you think?
One last word before the debate begins. You have, rightly, on previous occasions looked closely and critically at the wording of the propositions. In this case, as Mr Szafranski notes, it might be objected that technology didn't "promise" anything, though I think it's probably fair to say that many people assumed (and tech companies routinely claim) that its purpose is to simplify not complicate. "It didn't work," asserts Mr Szafranski. Or did it?

AdelineShenUID：2630498

The proposer's opening remarks

Standing back, we now can be fairly certain that the science and engineering that enabled humans to create today's engines of industrialisation, electrification, physics, medicine, genetics and the appliances of the information age also added significant complexity to our lives. Technology warmed the planet, added pollutants to the atmosphere and oceans, affected life forms by changing the background magnetic field (including adding increased extremely low-frequency radiation), enabled nuclear weapons and created thousands of chemical compounds that can help or hurt life. One cannot conclude that the convergent effects—social, environmental, political, economic, legal, psychological—of these technological developments simplified living or our lives. Technology has failed to simplify our lives.
Coping with the challenges caused by a warming planet will not be simple. Knowing the health effects—the effects on humans and other living organisms—of various pollutants and combinations of pollutants and appropriately dealing with them will not be simple. Understanding the biological consequences of changed magnetic fields and increased point and area sources of radiation is not uncomplicated. The problems associated with nuclear weapons' proliferation are only less complex than the problems that would arise from the use of such weapons. And it becomes increasingly difficult to assay the interactions, the lag times and the health consequences of the chemicals we ingest, even those we consume intentionally. Simpler lives? No.
Dealing with any one of these challenges is not simple; they are multi-dimensional and have converged and co-exist. "Technology"—shorthand for the fruits of science and engineering—and its convergent unintended and intended consequences have complicated our lives.
Take some familiar but trivial examples. The technologies that enable mass customisation, the internet and wireless devices and their applications, but a small sample, cause humans two problems that complicate our lives immensely. First, over-choice. Second, surplus complexity. Over-choice describes the human response to alternatives and variations so numerous, so potentially satisfying and so complex that humans can no longer decide easily. "Surplus complexity" is unnecessary and unwanted complexity.
We—hundreds of millions of us and growing—embrace the very technologies that make our lives and our relationships more difficult and fill many of our waking moments with activity. We love—to the point of gluttony—to communicate, play, invent, learn, imagine and acquire. Information technology has given us tools to do all of those anywhere and round the clock. We are awash in the benefits that high-bandwidth fixed and mobile wireless communications, email, text messages, pictures, games, data and information give us, including instant access to thousands of products. The seductive ease with which we can engage in any and all of those activities, or quests or endeavours makes it difficult and stressful to not be overwhelmed by choices. Choosing takes time and our time is not unlimited. Devices and applications that save us labour in one area may merely allow us, and sometimes seem to compel us, to invest labour in other areas.
We say or hear, "I must do my email tonight, or by tomorrow I'll have over 600 to read." We want to buy a pot. Search on "pottery" and get 254,000,000 results. We want to find the John Li we met at a conference. Search on "John Li" and get 8,600,000 results. Do I do email, narrow the searches, eat dinner, pick up my laundry or call a friend? Because technology has spawned numerous complex variations I must repeatedly go through the act of evaluating and choosing — a labour of deciding. Technology has imposed the encumbrance of over-choice on us.
Over-choice is made more likely and burdensome by the complexity resident in each of the choices that are presented to us. There are hundreds of choices within the seemingly simple one of getting a cellular telephone and choosing a provider and a plan. Some phones also are Pocket PCs with CDMA and GSM, video-players, music-players, web browsers, calculators and so forth. One must decide where and when the complexity becomes surplus. Choosing ring tones from among the surplus complexity evident in the thousands of tones available is almost unfathomable over-choice.
Businesses know that solutions to over-choice, on the one hand, and engineered surplus complexity, on the other, can produce revenue. Their solutions may complicate the problems. It may be that few consumers have or take the time to read a website's terms of services, privacy policy or licensing agreement before hitting "I agree." The willing or inadvertent disclosure of information about behaviour and the data bases that record past searches create the potential for precise marketing. Behavioural marketing, for example, uses data from multiple sources, including data in the public domain and data acquired by a target's past web searches, to push tailored products and services. More choices. When surplus complexity is engineered into a product—of a product's, say, 41 features, the consumer only wanted two—consumers pay for unnecessary and unused features. Unbundling is seen by some businesses or some industries as such radical customisation that it is priced prohibitively. We live in the multifaceted bundles that technology has enabled.
The system as a whole, the system we create and sustain and live in, now has so many and so complex separate parts that understanding consequential interactions, potential outcomes—intended and unintended—and long-term effects is more difficult than ever in human history. One might argue that the genesis of problems like over-choice and surplus complexity is in human frailty or human wants satisfied by technology, but, without technology, more simplicity would endure. Technology is the beneficial culprit that allowed us to do this.
One cannot conclude that humans making bad choices are the real culprit unless one ascribes to the unborn—past and future—the ability to choose. Technology, personified as defendant, could probably prove "I made no promises." Just so, but the issue under consideration is less any specific promise asserted than it was the promising possibilities of making our lives simpler that lured us, as we humans employed technology to solve problems and create opportunities.
It did not work.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

The opposition's opening remarks

Technology exists to advance and enhance our world in new ways. Sometimes it lets us add a new capability to our daily routine like the guilty pleasure of SMS-ing during a boring meeting. In other cases technology literally takes the pain away, as anyone with a successful hip replacement can attest. Adopting any technology is a conscious act of adding complexity to our lives. However while adding new complexities, a successful technology is able to at least dampen and at times completely remove the greater complexities that existed prior.
Fitting a hearing aid to your ear on a daily basis adds complexity, but the benefit of being able to hear significantly better makes life simpler. Keeping the fire of your Blackberry constantly lit drives you crazy, but your BB lets you be CEO while slipping away to attend your son's soccer game. Automobiles keep you stuck in traffic and expend excessive energy, but these same technologies can transport you to the mountains or beach for repose. When looking at your life overall, there should be no doubt that technology has simplified many aspects of your existence. It has given you options to live your life how you want and when you want in ways that were never before possible. And truly, what is more simple than being free?
The bad rap given to technologies today will be only temporary. Yes my wireless Bluetooth headset sometimes forgets that my iPhone exists even when they are only a millimeter apart. Yes a few months ago my computer crashed for the first time in three years and I lost all my data. Yes my laser printer and I will dance an odd lovers game of "I could have sworn I told you to print but you don't seem to notice me." But we are in a transitional period where technologies are brittle not because they are failing per se — they are just new and experimental. And yes, we are all the unlikely guinea pigs that are happier on some days than others. Do you think the people that first owned and drove automobiles lived untroubled lives? I think not, but the benefits likely outweighed any setbacks otherwise we would still be riding horses today.
Remember that computers did not really take off until less than ten years ago. They were these big, ugly, and clunky boxes with even bigger "TV sets" attached to them. Now within a size smaller than my fist a computer that is hundreds of times more powerful sits within my palm. And within a few months it will become twice as powerful. In the history of humankind, there have never been similar technological advances happening at the incredible rate of change today. The glitches are there because we are all explorers, and just haven't been told we are thus so.
Recognise simplicity as being about two goals realised simultaneously: the saving of time to realise efficiencies, and later wasting the time that you have gained on some humanly pursuit. Thus true simplicity in life is one part technology, and the other part away from technology. Much confusion lies today in the fact that technology has invaded many of our recreational activities such as music listening and video viewing. Thus as explorers in technology, we have ventured out of just the "got-to-have" categories of pacemakers and other life-saving necessities, into the "nice-to-have" categories of iPods and other life-styling gadgetry. Our thirst for exotic experiences in technology only pushes us further down the path of increasing unpredictability. Engaging new technologies is about embracing new inventions and the passion for cultural advancement — it is a game usually only reserved for the young that we can now play no matter how old we are.
We voluntarily let technology enter our lives in the infantile state that it currently exists, and the challenge is to wait for it to mature to something we can all be proud of. Patience is a virtue I am told, and I await the many improvements that lie ahead. To say that technology is failing to simplify our lives misses the point that in the past decade we have lived in an era of breakneck innovation. This pace is fortunately slowing and industries are retrenching so that design-led approaches can take command to give root to more meaningful technology experiences. There are advanced developments underway at MIT, CMU, and Stanford for improving user interfaces, data visualisation, network reliability, and energy management that will reduce the 10% of downsides we feel today compared with the 90% of upsides brought on by both life-saving and life-styling technologies.
The conveniences gained of extended life spans, click-to-buy anything off of the web, and even online dating are all concrete examples of enhancement that vastly simplify our lives. They make our lives more complex in addition: a longer life means more to think about, an online purchase can come in the wrong colour, and a virtual date can go awry. Do the positives outweigh the negatives? Often you will find that the answer is: Yes. When any newer technology is concerned, you are adopting the cause of innovation and as such should expect some turbulence along the way. In the near future we will see a renaissance in design-led technology developments that will reduce the bumpiness we currently experience to give way to simplicity every day. Technology will unite with design and the arts in unprecedented harmony such that not only will our lives be simplified, but more importantly satisfying.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

宋爷爷让我们写一篇关于cloud的paper，在翻economist的debate的时候竟然看到一篇相关的debate 哈~

AdelineShenUID：2630498

This house believes that the cloud cannot be entirely trusted.

about this debate

There is nothing the computer industry likes better than a big new idea. Cloud computing is the latest example, and companies large and small are already joining the fray. The idea is that computing will increasingly be delivered as a service, over the internet, from vast warehouses of shared machines. Many things work this way already, from email and photo albums to calendars and shared documents. Albeit more slowly, companies are also moving some of their applications into the cloud. But is this a good idea? Can providers of these computing clouds be trusted? Are these mainframes in the sky reliable enough? What happens if data get lost? What about privacy and lock-in? Will switching to another cloud be difficult?

AdelineShenUID：2630498

The moderator's opening remarks

Everybody loves the cloud. Everybody but Larry Ellison, that is. Whenever he's on stage these days, the boss of the software giant, Oracle, keeps dissing the latest buzzword of the information technology (IT) industry. Cloud computing, he rants, is just "water vapour", "nonsense", "just a computer connected to a network" and "something we have done for more than ten years".
The refreshing anti-hype rant notwithstanding, even this cloud contrarian would not deny that there is something profound going on in IT land. Although cloud computing (or utility computing, software as a service, SaaS, or however you might term it) is certainly nothing new, there is no doubt that computing is increasingly becoming a utility. Whether it is raw computing power (provided, for instance, by Amazon), platforms that allow others to develop (Microsoft's Azure and Google's App Engine), web-based services (Salesforce.com, Google Apps, etc) or most of the online offerings labelled "web 2.0" (Facebook, Twitter), more and more of computing takes the form of a service and happens in big data centres. This does not come as a surprise: it follows naturally from the combination of ever cheaper and more powerful processors with ever faster and more ubiquitous networks, allowing computing to centralise again after years of becoming more distributed.
The participants in this debate, including the three guest speakers, all agree that computing is moving into the cloud. "We are experiencing a disruptive moment in the history of technology, with the expansion of the role of the internet and the advent of cloud-based computing", says Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's business division, which generates about a third of the firm's revenues ($13 billion) and more than half of its profits ($4.5 billion) in the most recent quarter. Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com, the world's largest SaaS provider with over $1.2 billion in sales in the past 12 months, is no less bullish: "Like the shift [from the mainframe to the client/server architecture] that roiled our industry in decades past, the transition to cloud computing is happening now because of major discontinuities in cost, value and function."
Yet the harmony ends when it comes to the question of how far this journey into the cloud should go. "While I advocate for the cloud, there's a desire among many customers to avoid a technology ultimatum," argues Mr Elop. To him, a mixed approach, which Microsoft calls "software plus services", is a much more realistic scenario for most organisations: "Certain applications will be well served by the cloud, while others will benefit from immediate proximity to local computing and graphical capabilities, memory, storage and so on."
Mr Benioff could not disagree more. To him cloud computing is a shift that leaves the old technology behind: "Because the vendor only has a single code base to manage, rather than dozens scattered over various platforms and operating systems, customers receive virtually constant innovation. Upgrades are seamless." In this context, he cannot resist the temptation to take a first swipe at his debating rival: "Once the industry's leader, Microsoft has failed to innovate in its core Windows franchise. Investing in and delivering this rapid innovation without invoking an upgrade tax is a change that customers welcome and is the foundation of trust in the cloud."
Whether and to what extent companies and consumers elect to hand their computing over to others, of course, depends on how much they trust the cloud. And customers still have many questions. How reliable are such services? What about privacy? Don't I lose too much control? What if Salesforce.com, for instance, changes its service in a way I do not like? Are such web-based services really cheaper than traditional software? And how easy is it to get my data if I want to change providers? Are there open technical standards that would make this easier?
These are the questions firms such as Microsoft and Salesforce.com need to answer if the cloud, in whichever shape, is to really take off. We hope to hear some convincing answers as the debate goes on. Just saying that customers will get used to the cloud as they have got used to banks (Mr Elop) or that they already trust the cloud (Mr Benioff) does not suffice.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

The proposer's opening remarks

Let me state, first and foremost, that I believe the cloud can and ultimately will be trusted. There is little debate about whether the cloud is a great technology evolution. The benefits of increased productivity, cost savings and improved efficiency, plus the ability to support and empower a broader range of users via the cloud are clear. Rather, the debate is about how soon companies will feel comfortable about moving mission-critical computing capabilities, or parts of them, to the cloud, which in turn depends on how soon vendors develop the right solutions that are flexible, widely available and have established a proven track record.

The cloud cannot be all things to all businesses. A mixed approach to the cloud, with the choices afforded by software plus services, is a much more flexible and realistic scenario for most organisations. While I advocate the cloud, there is a desire among many customers to avoid a technology ultimatum. So it is smart to focus on what customers want, and their readiness to embrace the cloud for various applications in the context of their circumstances, instead of forcing a decision to move everything to the cloud.
We are experiencing a disruptive moment in the history of technology, with the expansion of the role of the internet and the advent of cloud-based computing. The global economic turmoil has affected the evolution of the cloud too, driving a faster rate of adoption with demand for less expensive cloud services that benefit from the economies of scale. This gives decision-makers more reasons to look for choice and flexibility in a solution, and to make a thoughtful decision about long-term success before moving to the cloud.
A time of disruption is also a time to have impact. I think back to the early days of the internet, when e-commerce was just becoming something of interest. The big question then was when would people become comfortable giving a credit card to a web browser and actually going through with a transaction. People were concerned—rightly so—because there were questions about security, reliability and everything else that goes along with business on the web. Over time, opinions changed as companies gained experience and the ability to protect customer privacy and security, showing us that certain levels of engagement are appropriate for e-commerce. People started saying "I'm comfortable with that."
I can't predict how long it will take for that broad business shift to happen with cloud-based technologies, but it will. Vendors will learn how to deliver the right solutions at the right time and the right price. Customers will demand choice, and the ability to tailor cloud solutions in an unlimited number of ways, including the prerogative to side-step "lock-in" and instead have the option to change vendors in a heartbeat, without their employees, partners or customers feeling any pain.
Today, some of the world's largest companies are using cloud-based computing, paving the way for others. At Microsoft, we are seeing the majority of that adoption through our Exchange Online and SharePoint Online offerings, where millions of paying customers, including Coca Cola Enterprises, McDonalds and GlaxoSmithKline, are signing up for and using the cloud. As these workers gain experience and understand what cloud-based business services are all about, we will see more people become comfortable with the idea of "Hey, it's not in my data center" or "It's in a shared environment". The time it takes to make this leap is also a function of the quality of the experience that customers want and expect as we navigate this new territory.
For example, one of our customers, McDonalds, is deploying Exchange and SharePoint Online to 20,000 employees while continuing to run Exchange and SharePoint Servers on-premises for the rest of its users. This hybrid approach improves collaboration by keeping everyone on the same system, but also addresses some of the company's particular security and compliance needs.
There is, however, another way the house motion could be interpreted, aside from the security and reliability interpretation of the word "trust". Specifically, we could ask: "Will the cloud be the ultimate home for all aspects of computing?" Some companies have attempted to make the concept of "no software" popular (implying that everything will be in the cloud), but I have a decidedly different point of view. To me, the phrase "software plus services" indicates the cloud will not be trusted with all aspects of computing. Certain applications will be well served by the cloud, while others will benefit from immediate proximity to local computing and graphical capabilities, memory, storage and so on. Most applications in the future will also benefit from the marriage of local and cloud-based capabilities; that is why I advocate the union of software plus services.
Amazon's Kindle is a great example showing us that the cloud will not be trusted with all aspects of computing. "Reading a book" on Kindle is best served by local capabilities on a purpose-built device, while "buying a book" for a Kindle is perfectly suited to interoperability with a cloud-based service.
The popularity of iPhone applications is yet another example, with rich applications that take advantage of local computing strengths and are connected to the cloud. Software plus services offers the best of both worlds.
We are taking the same approach with Microsoft Office. You might prefer to use a browser to get work done at an internet café, or while visiting a client's office. An Office web-based application (e.g., Word within the browser) may be the right tool at that time. On the other hand, there are situations where a rich client application is most effective, and the full functionality of the PC is needed. (Today, working with a video in PowerPoint is best delivered on a PC.) Of course, mobility is a rapidly growing requirement for all of us too, with its own set of benefits and specific requirements. The capability of the cloud will continue to evolve, and more utility will be delivered in the cloud over time. At the same time, uses for general purpose computers or purpose-built devices will also continue to rapidly evolve.
When it comes to the cloud, rally the troops and embrace what needs to be done to improve productivity by taking advantage of the PC, phone and the browser. That may entail a little cloud, a lot of cloud, or even (gasp) no cloud at all, at least for right now, in certain situations. I believe we should embrace the opportunities of cloud computing, while continuing to lead innovation in client computing.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

The opposition's opening remarks

Despite the huge changes in technology, this debate would have been remarkably similar 20 years ago. The proponent would have said that current technologies have years of investment and billions of dollars on their side and that the challenger is too risky, too unproven, too lightweight. It would be foolhardy to open up access to corporate data or to give so many people access to so much computing power. No sensible company would allow it. The opposition would have said that the opportunities far outweighed the risk, that we stand at the beginning of a new era of technological insight, worker productivity and economic benefit.
Twenty years ago, companies such as IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation were defending the stalwart mainframe against the rise of the PC and client/server. The client/server period in its early years revolutionised the cost of and access to information technology. But today, we see client/server companies like Microsoft, SAP and Oracle from that period attempt to deny the power and appeal of cloud computing.
Like the shift that roiled our industry in decades past, the transition to cloud computing is happening now because of major discontinuities in cost, value and function. It is happening because legions of companies do trust the cloud. And it is creating winners and losers.
The clear winner is the customer. Salesforce.com, which has been providing what we now call cloud services for ten years, has more than 63,000 customers around the world, including Dell, Cisco, Symantec, Dow Jones Newswires and Aon. When we started, we were pretty much alone in the business. But now, there are many clouds to choose from—everything from financials to the classic productivity apps we all use every day.
Customers are making this choice—and voting their trust with their euros, pounds, yen and dollars—because the software industry grew too greedy, too complex and too out of touch with the customer. Outrageously expensive to buy, costly to maintain and difficult to change, traditional client/server software has failed customers for years.
Now that they have a real choice, customers are moving to the cloud. According to IDC, the cloud is on the minds of every CIO. Over the next five years, IDC expects spending on IT cloud services to grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012 and accounting for 9% of revenues in five key market segments.
Even Microsoft, the company that stands to lose the most from this dramatic shift, has embraced the cloud, vowing to introduce cloud-based services.
Customers trust the cloud and are driving this shift for four major reasons: core cloud technology, cloud economics, cloud scalability and agility, and cloud trust and security.
The foundation of cloud technology is multitenancy. In the same way that large urban office buildings house multiple discrete, secure tenants that share core services like plumbing, electricity and elevators, cloud services manage data and applications. This approach has several benefits. Because the vendor only has a single code base to manage, rather than dozens scattered over various platforms and operating systems, customers receive virtually constant innovation. Upgrades are seamless. The contrast with traditional software is stark. Perhaps the best example is Microsoft. Once the industry's leader, Microsoft has failed to innovate in its core Windows franchise. Investing in and delivering this rapid innovation without invoking an upgrade tax is a change that customers welcome and is the foundation of trust in the cloud.
The business model behind the cloud is also a big break with the client/server past. The central idea is subscriptions: customers pay as they go; vendors recognise revenue as they deliver the service. The appeal is compelling for customers of all types. This model aligns the vendor with the customer's success. That is a big change from the way we thought of the relationship when I was in the enterprise software business, where it was all about making the sale. Today, cloud-computing vendors know they have to build enduring customer relationships, not the one-night stands that define traditional software sales.
The cloud model makes sense in any environment, but in a time when budgets are tight, more organisations are taking a closer look at cloud services. Recently, the City of Los Angeles signed its 30,000 employees up for Google Apps. It was a pitched battle with Microsoft for the five-year contract. The LA City Council voted their trust in the cloud 12-0.
Scalability is one of IT's toughest burdens. "Because every company still has to maintain its own data processing plant," says Nick Carr, author of Does IT Matter? and The Big Switch, "You have high levels of inefficiency built into the system." Carr says that according to an HP study, the typical corporate server runs at 20% capacity. That is a staggering waste of resources not just for corporations, but for society at large. The business models of traditional software vendors are built around this captive demand in the data centre. For a low, predictable monthly subscription, cloud computing delivers capacity that can effortlessly scale from thousands to millions of users, all with the complete backup and disaster recovery services that today's enterprise user requires. Nothing builds trust like charging customers for exactly what they need and nothing more.
As clouds mature, a new era of enterprise agility is opening up as cloud platforms become more widely used. Google's AppEngine, Amazon Web Services,and our Force.com take vastly different approaches, but all of them liberate the customer from the time-consuming task of provisioning new hardware and software, and in the case of Force.com, allows developers to achieve results five times faster and at half the cost of traditional platforms. Customers have responded by creating over 120,000 custom objects and applications on our service. And none of our customers had to fire up a server, worry about where it was going to sit in the data centre, or fret over incremental real-estate or infrastructure costs. Customers trust platforms that remove barriers to innovation, enable them to allocate resources more efficiently and, most importantly, move and change with far greater agility.
Allow me to cite an example. About a month before President Obama's inauguration, Starbucks came to us with an idea. They wanted to encourage local volunteerism in the United States by offering a free cup of coffee to anyone who would pledge five hours' work to a local charity. Great idea, I thought. "When do you need it?" I asked. "Three weeks" was the answer. Because the infrastructure had been taken care of and the cloud development platform was robust enough, we delivered the site for CEO Howard Schultz's appearance on "Oprah" before the inauguration. The surge in traffic, which would have strained most corporate infrastructures, caused barely a blip in our daily traffic. Starbucks could not have pulled this off if they had tried to rely on traditional software tools. Schultz knew he could trust the operation of Starbucks breakthrough Pledge5 site to saleforce.com because of the record of reliability that we had established. The site has been a huge hit, with more than 1.3m hours of volunteering pledged.
The conversation around the cloud has changed dramatically in the more than ten years that I have been in this business. At the beginning, companies were taking a leap of faith. But the ensuing decade of customer successs and rapidly developing technologies—both ours and others—have transformed that leap of faith into a leap into the future.
One of the earliest questions was about reliability. What if the service wasn't available? This question was frustrating in our early days because we knew that we could provide a much higher level of service than most companies could do for themselves, and at a far lower cost. Customers could understand and believe in the delegation of responsibility for the application. They were not giving up control; they were shedding an onerous burden. But a missing critical dimension was transparency. On the rare occasions when there were issues, customers wanted visibility of exactly what was going on. That desire was the inspiration behind trust.salesforce.com, our public site that details both the live and historical status of our service. We think that this level of transparency should be the cornerstone of customer trust for every cloud service.
There is no greater priority for me as CEO than the security of our customers' data. We don't have a business without it, and we start each day knowing that there is no finish line in this quest.
However, many discussions of cloud computing start with an assumption that cloud services are less secure than their legacy enterprise software counterparts. But that is certainly not the conclusion of our customers. Our scale lets us devote significant resources to our security life cycle, independent reviews, certifications and control frameworks, vulnerability testing and other security programmes. Salesforce.com has earned some of the most exacting security certifications today, including ISO 27001, SysTrust, TrustE and SAS 70, Type II. The end result is that we meet and in many cases exceed the security needs of our customers, and many of our customers have told us that we have a more comprehensive, in-depth security programme than their resources will allow for their other systems. And we are constantly undergoing thorough security audits by our customers, which include some of the most technologically rigorous and security-conscious organisations in the business. Our customer reviews and and the cooperation of their security watchdogs ensure that our security is constantly evolving and improving—not just for one customer, but for all 63,000 of them. Our security is democratic, flexible and simple for our customers.
That is reassuring to the black belts in security. But what about the rest of us?
At Google's Atmosphere conference in London, Google's Nikesh Arora told a story we can all relate to. He was late for a flight. Airport security was the usual tough slog: Pockets empty. Shoes and belt off. Laptop out. With moments to spare, he makes the plane. But his bag is a little too light. The laptop is back at security. This is not going to be a good flight.
At most companies, the loss of a key executive's laptop would be a major cause for worry. But this laptop is different from most that passed through Heathrow that day: there is not much on it, and certainly no sensitive company data. Everything is in the cloud. Mr Arora got a new laptop, connected to all his Google Apps, and was back in business.
That is why companies trust the cloud today: It delivers more innovation at far lower cost and complexity. And although there are still customers who prefer to trust the devil they know, more and more each day are rejecting the cost, complexity and meagre returns of client/server technologies and are choosing cloud computing.

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A special report on South Africa
The price of freedomSince embracing full democracy 16 years ago, South Africa has made huge strides. But, says Diana Geddes (interviewed here), not everything has changed for the betterJun 3rd 2010 | From The Economist print edition

SPORT matters in South Africa. In his new year’s address to the nation, President Jacob Zuma described 2010 as “the most important year in our country since 1994”. To outsiders, playing host to this year’s football World Cup seemed perhaps a less momentous event than holding the country’s first fully democratic elections that established a black-majority government 16 years ago—especially when the national team, Bafana Bafana, may be knocked out in the first round. But with the kick-off on June 11th, just days after the country’s 100th birthday on May 31st, the world’s eyes will be on Africa’s leading economy for the next few weeks.
Can the “miracle” nation, which won plaudits around the world for its peaceful transition to democracy after centuries of white-supremacist rule, conquer the bitter divisions of its past to turn itself into the “rainbow nation” of Nelson Mandela’s dreams? Or will it become ever more mired in bad governance, racial tension, poverty, corruption, violence and decay to turn into yet another African failed state? With Zimbabwe, its neighbour to the north, an ever-present reminder of what can happen after just a couple of decades of post-liberation single-party rule, many South Africans, black and white, worry that their country may be reaching a tipping point.

Western fans arriving in South Africa for the World Cup could be forgiven for thinking that they were still in the rich world. Much of the infrastructure is as good as you will find anywhere—particularly those parts that have been given multi-million-dollar facelifts in preparation for the tournament. Ten spectacular stadiums have been newly built or upgraded at a cost of 15 billion rand (see box for currency conversions). Visitors arriving at O.R. Tambo, the main international airport, will be whisked into Johannesburg by the Gautrain, Africa’s first high-speed rail link (pictured above). And many of the country’s hotels and restaurants are world-class, including Bushmans Kloof hotel, three hours’ drive from Cape Town, recently voted the world’s best by Travel + Leisure website, and Cape Town’s La Colombe, ranked 12th in this year’s S.Pellegrino list of the best restaurants.
Not as rich as it looksBut in reality South Africa is no more than a middle-income developing country with a GDP per person of around $10,000 (at purchasing-power parity), a quarter of the American figure. On a per-head basis, it is the seventh-richest country in Africa by some measures. The average hides huge disparities. Under apartheid, whites were encouraged to believe they were part of the Western world. It was only when they had to start sharing their streets, goods and services with their darker-skinned compatriots that they began to wonder whether they really were. Many now complain about falling standards. Yet most whites have done rather well since apartheid ended—better, in fact, than most blacks. They still enjoy a good life, helped by cheap domestic help and first-class private medical care and schools.
For the majority of South Africa’s blacks, however, the living is not so easy. Although many of the poorest now get some kind of government support, it is only a pittance. Most blacks still live in shoddy shacks or bungalows without proper sanitation in poor crime-ridden townships outside the main cities. Their schools and hospitals are often in a dire state. And, in a country where there is little public transport, most blacks do not own a car. Although it has the world’s 24th-biggest economy, South Africa ranks a dismal 129th out of 182 on the UN’s Human Development Index (and 12th in Africa).
The country’s constitution, adopted in 1996, is one of the most progressive in the world. It enshrines a wide range of social and economic rights as well as the more usual civil and political freedoms. Discrimination is banned not only on the grounds of race, gender, age and belief, but also of pregnancy, marital status, sexual orientation and culture. Every one of the country’s 49m people—79% black, 9% white, 9% coloured (mixed race) and 3% Asian/Indian—is guaranteed equal protection under the law. Freedom House, a Washington-based research foundation, gives South Africa a respectable rating of 2 in its “freedom in the world” index, where 1 is completely free and 7 totally unfree.

South Africa is a land of contrasts. It has fabulous mineral wealth, with 90% of the world’s known platinum reserves, 80% of its manganese, 70% of its chrome and 40% of its gold, as well as rich coal deposits; yet 43% of its population live on less than $2 a day. It has just announced plans to develop a satellite programme (with India and Brazil) and is the leading candidate to host the world’s biggest science project, the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope; yet in international maths, science and reading tests it performs abysmally. It has sky-high unemployment yet at the same time suffers from crippling skills shortages. It was the first country to perform a heart transplant, and some of its doctors are still among the best anywhere; yet its people’s health record is among the world’s worst. And, leaving aside war zones, it is one of the most violent and crime-ridden countries on the planet. This special report will look at South Africa the way that most of its people see it. The results are often harsh.
The bright sideYet there are some encouraging signs that the contrasts are getting less stark. South Africa has recently cut its murder rate in half; virtually eradicated severe malnutrition among the under-fives; increased the enrolment in schools of children aged seven to 15 to nearly 100%; provided welfare benefits for 15m people; and set up the world’s biggest antiretroviral treatment programme for HIV/AIDS.
What about race? South Africa remains obsessed by it. That is hardly surprising after 350 years of racial polarisation, including nearly half a century of apartheid, when inter-racial sex was a criminal offence and non-whites were even banned from using the pavements. The subject waxes and wanes. Only last August Mr Zuma was warning his compatriots against reviving the race debate. But the murder in April of Eugene Terre’Blanche, leader of a white-supremacist group, and the racist outbursts by Julius Malema, the leader of the powerful Youth League of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), have brought it to the fore again.

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A special report on the human genome
Biology 2.0
A decade after the human-genome project, writes Geoffrey Carr (interviewed here), biological science is poised on the edge of something wonderful Jun 17th 2010

TEN years ago, on June 26th 2000, a race ended. The result was declared a dead heat and both runners won the prize of shaking the hand of America’s then president, Bill Clinton, at the White House. The runners were J. Craig Venter for the private sector and Francis Collins for the public. The race was to sequence the human genome, all 3 billion genetic letters of it, and thus—as headline writers put it—read the book of life.
It quite caught the public imagination at the time. There was the drama of a maverick upstart, in the form of Dr Venter and his newly created firm, Celera, taking on the medical establishment, in the form of Dr Collins’s International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium. There was the promise of a cornucopia of new drugs as genetic targets previously unknown to biologists succumbed to pharmacological investigation. There was talk of an era of “personalised medicine” in which treatments would be tailored to an individual’s genetic make-up. There was the frisson of fear that a genetic helotry would be created, doomed by its DNA to second-class health care, education and employment. And there was, in some quarters, a hope that a biotech boom based on genomics might pick up the baton that the internet boom had just dropped, and that lots and lots of money would be made.

brief introduction to the race happened ten years ago about human genome sequence.

And then it all went terribly quiet. The drugs did not appear. Nor did personalised medicine. Neither did the genetic underclass. And the money certainly did not materialise. Biotech firms proved to be just as good at consuming cash as dotcom start-ups, and with as little return. The casual observer, then, might be forgiven for thinking the whole thing a damp squib, and the $3 billion spent on the project to be so much wasted money. But the casual observer would be wrong. As The Economist observed at the time, the race Dr Venter and Dr Collins had been engaged in was a race not to the finish but to the starting line. Moreover, compared with the sprint they had been running in the closing years of the 1990s, the new race marked by that starting line was a marathon.
In this special report

Sources and acknowledgments Where are they now? » Biology 2.0 « Marathon man It's personal The dragon's DNA Inhuman genomes The soul of an old machine No hiding place
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• A special report on the human genome: Where are they now?Jun 17th 2010

The new race has been dogged by difficulties from the beginning. There was a false start (the announcement at the White House that the sequence was complete relied on a generous definition of that word: a truly complete sequence was not published until 2003). The competitors then ran into numerous obstacles that nature had strewn on the course. They found at first that there were far fewer genes than they had expected, only to discover later that there were far more. These discoveries changed the meaning of the word “gene”. They found the way genes are switched on and off is at least as important, both biologically and medically, as the composition of those genes. They found that their methods for linking genetic variation to disease were inadequate. And they found, above all, that they did not have enough genomes to work on. Each human genome is different, and that matters.

All is revealed
One by one, however, these obstacles are falling away. As they do so, the science of biology is being transformed. It seems quite likely that future historians of science will divide biology into the pre- and post-genomic eras.
In one way, post-genomic biology—biology 2.0, if you like—has finally killed the idea of vitalism, the persistent belief that to explain how living things work, something more is needed than just an understanding of their physics and chemistry. True, no biologist has really believed in vitalism for more than a century. Nevertheless, the promise of genomics, that the parts list of a cell and, by extension, of a living organism, is finite and cataloguable, leaves no room for ghosts in the machine.
Viewed another way, though, biology 2.0 is actually neo-vitalistic. No one thinks that a computer is anything more than the sum of its continually changing physical states, yet those states can be abstracted into concepts and processed by a branch of learning that has come to be known as information science, independently of the shifting pattern of electrical charges inside the computer’s processor.
So it is with the new biology.(nice analogy) The chemicals in a cell are the hardware. The information encoded in the DNA is the preloaded software. The interactions between the cellular chemicals are like the constantly changing states of processing and memory chips. Though understanding the genome has proved more complicated than expected, no discovery made so far suggests anything other than that all the information needed to make a cell is squirreled away in the DNA. Yet the whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts.
Whether the new biology is viewed as rigorously mechanistic or neo-vitalistic, what has become apparent over the past decade is that the process by which the genome regulates itself, both directly by one gene telling another what to do and indirectly by manipulating the other molecules in a cell, is vastly more complicated and sophisticated than anybody expected. Yet it now looks tractable in a way that 20 years ago it did not. Just as a team of engineers, given a rival’s computer, could strip it down and understand it perfectly, so biologists now believe that, in the fullness of time, they will be able to understand perfectly how a cell works.
And if cells can be understood completely in this way, then ultimately it should be possible to understand assemblages of cells such as animals and plants with equal completeness. That is a much more complicated problem, but it is different only in degree, not kind. Moreover, understanding—complete or partial—brings the possibility of manipulation. The past few weeks have seen an announcement that may, in retrospect, turn out to have been as portentous as the sequencing of the human genome: Dr Venter’s construction of an organism with a completely synthetic genome. The ability to write new genomes in this way brings true biological engineering—as opposed to the tinkering that passes for biotechnology at the moment—a step closer.
A second portentous announcement, of the genome of mankind’s closest—albeit extinct—relative, Neanderthal man, shows the power of biology 2.0 in a different way. Putting together some 1.3 billion fragments of 40,000-year-old DNA, contaminated as they were with the fungi and bacteria of millennia of decay and the personal genetic imprints of the dozens of archaeologists who had handled the bones, demonstrates how far the technology of genomics has advanced over the course of the past decade. It also shows that biology 2.0 can solve the other great question besides how life works: how it has evolved and diversified over the course of time.
As is often the way with scientific discovery, technological breakthroughs of the sort that have given science the Neanderthal genome have been as important to the development of genomics as intellectual insights have been. The telescope revolutionised astronomy; the microscope, biology; and the spectroscope, chemistry.(desctribe the way with scientific discovery) The genomic revolution depends on two technological changes. One, in computing power, is generic—though computer-makers are slavering at the amount of data that biology 2.0 will need to process, and the amount of kit that will be needed to do the processing. This torrent of data, however, is the result of the second technological change that is driving genomics, in the power of DNA sequencing.

The new law
Computing has, famously, increased in potency according to Moore’s law. This says that computers double in power roughly every two years—an increase of more than 30 times over the course of a decade, with concomitant reductions in cost.


There is, as yet, no sobriquet for its genomic equivalent, but there should be. Eric Lander, the head of the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is America’s largest DNA-sequencing centre, calculates that the cost of DNA sequencing at the institute has fallen to a hundred-thousandth of what it was a decade ago (see chart 1). The genome sequenced by the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (actually a composite from several individuals) took 13 years and cost $3 billion. Now, using the latest sequencers from Illumina, of San Diego, California, a human genome can be read in eight days at a cost of about $10,000. Nor is that the end of the story. Another Californian firm, Pacific Biosciences, of Menlo Park, has a technology that can read genomes from single DNA molecules. It thinks that in three years’ time this will be able to map a human genome in 15 minutes for less than $1,000. And a rival technology being developed in Britain by Oxford Nanopore Technologies aspires to similar speeds and cost.
This increase in speed and reduction in cost is turning the business of biology upside down. Up until now, firms that claim to read individual genomes (see article) have been using a shortcut. They have employed arrays of DNA probes, known as gene chips, to look for pre-identified variations in their clients’ DNA. Those variations have been discovered by scientific collaborations such as the International HapMap Project, which search for mutations of the genetic code called single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, in blocks of DNA called haplotypes. A SNP (pronounced “snip”) is a place where a lone genetic letter varies from person to person. Some 10m SNPs are now known, but in the forest of 3 billion genetic letters there is reason to believe they are but a smattering of the total variation. Proper sequencing will reveal the lot.
Finding the sequence—even the full range of sequences—is, though, just the beginning. You then have to do something useful with the result. This is where the computing comes in. Computers allow individual genomes—all 3 billion base pairs of them—to be compared. And not only human genomes. Cross-species comparisons are enormously valuable. Laboratory experiments on creatures ranging from yeast to mice can reveal the functions of genes in these species. Computer comparison then shows which human genes correspond in DNA sequence and thus, presumably, in function, to the genes in these “model” organisms.
Cross-species comparison also shows how species differ, and thus how they have diverged. Comparing DNA from populations within a species can show how that species is evolving. Comparing DNA from individuals within a population can explain why those individuals differ from one another. And comparing the DNA from cells within an individual can show how tissues develop and become differentiated from one another, and what goes wrong in diseases like cancer.
Even before cheap sequencing became available, huge databases were being built up. In alliance with pathology samples, doctors’ notes and—most valuable of all—long-term studies of particular groups of individuals, genetic information can be linked to what biologists refer to as the phenotype. This is an organism’s outward expression: its anatomy, physiology and behaviour, whether healthy or pathological. The goal of the new biology is to tie these things together reliably and to understand how the phenotype emerges from the genotype.
That will lead to better medical diagnosis and treatment. It will result in the ability to manipulate animals, plants, fungi and bacteria to human ends. It will explain the history of life. And it will reveal, in pitiless detail, exactly what it is to be human.