Vendor "Vision Lock-In" in the Cloud

James Urquhart, my co-host of the Overcast podcast, and whose blog The Wisdom of Clouds is now syndicated on CNET, wrote a thoughtful piece entitled Can Sun rise to the cloud-computing challenge? This, of course, follows on the heals of the recent podcast interview James and I conducted with Lew Tucker, CTO of Cloud Computing at Sun Microsystems.

Sun has been making it quite clear that it has big plans for the cloud. In his piece James points out an event he attended in which Tucker and Dave Douglas (head of cloud at Sun) talked about their intentions to go all-in. And the two have been interviewing in the press lately (see additional links in my previous post).

But as James points out:

This was more of a "placeholder" presentation--certainly not a major announcement--but Douglas and Tucker laid out a foundation of concepts, and then outlined how Sun can work to address the opportunities this market creates.
This, of course, is a little disappointing, though completely understandable. Disappointing because we are seeing the dawn of cloud-computing giants, some created from the elegant artistry of the entrepreneurial engine, some crafted by the brute force from the clay of existing IT giants.

Sun isn't alone in taking this approach. In the last few months we've seen almost every major vendor --  Microsoft, IBM, HP, VMWare, Google, Amazon and Sun to name a few  -- make announcements of future products, services and features and lay-out their vision in broad strokes. And for the most part, that's what it is -- announcements. In many cases, the actual release dates of products have not yet been disclosed (e.g., Microsoft Azure or VMWare vCloud). In other cases, it has not been actual products or servvices announced but "roadmaps".

I already pointed this out in Overcast Show #1: this is a phenomenon I call "vision lock-in". Cloud computing is hot, and with the combination of a the poor economy, many CIOs are now examining their options. The large vendors are facing a dilemma. On the one hand, they have big ships to steer and it takes time to turn them around if you want to do it right. On the other hand, they need to make it clear to the marketplace that they are going to be a player in the space. So they make big announcements and lay out roadmaps. At the very least, this makes potential customers pause to think "maybe I should wait just a little longer to see what these guys come up with before I make any major decisions."