Things go better with cloud

I just read a thought provoking blog post about the impact of cloud computing.  The gist of the article is that the more jobs that get outsourced to the cloud, the worse the job market and thus the economy will become.  At face value this kind of doom and gloom prediction is understandable.  In my opinion the article takes a single non-evolving viewpoint and tries to turn it into reality.  The truth is people adapt and change and those who don't become extinct.  Clinging to the old ways is a recipe for failure.  Learning from the old ways and improving on them is the only way we can make real progress.  I can cite a very solid example of how outsourcing to "The Cloud" has created more jobs and opportunity for the the majority of the world, read on to see it.

To see the effects of manual labor being replaced by technology in the cloud you need look no further than your traditional home telephone.  That's right, that bastion of communication that we all know and love was outsourced to the cloud decades ago.  Those of you who are old enough will remember picking up a phone and asking to be connected to a location and number and the operator would "patch it through."  There were literally cables being plugged between one location's wiring and another location's wiring.  These operators were acting as the switches in the current telco world.


I don't think you would find anyone, including the operators who patched the calls that would say we should still be doing things that way.  Manual effort gave way to automation and that automation turned into a completely transparent voice network that "just works."  I don't think anyone would argue that the current telecom world we live in has created less jobs than the old operator driven exchanges.  Those people were replaced with technology that enabled the creation of the modern communication infrastructure we use today.  That modern communication infrastructure has enabled the creation of literally millions of jobs that would never have existed had we stuck to the old manual way.  In fact, you can read this post thanks of the progress that was made all those years ago.


Don't fear migration to the cloud as the end of jobs as we know them.  Look toward the cloud as enablement of all the things we never though possible before.  Those things take labor and knowledge and no one is born knowing this stuff.  It is the people who's jobs get replaced with automation that will build the next technologies that propel us further into the future.