Tune into: Decentralisation
More than with previous technological (r)evolutions a side effect of cloud computing seems to be an increase in the degree of centralisation and concentration, not just within company organisations, but particularly in the wider commercial market. This is the most obvious with Software as a Service, where providers such as AirBNB, Uber, but also earlier cloud services such as LinkedIn and Google Search quickly established a ‘winner takes all’ distribution of market share and thus market power. And also in Infrastructure as a Service, we see an quickly diminishing number of suppliers still having the illusion that they can keep up with the gorilla in this market.
My first scientific encounter with centralisation and decentralisation was during the early eighties of the last century – when Prof. Gert Nielen – one of the founders of the then just launched Business Information Science curriculum – stated that centralisation and decentralisation can best understood as a sponge. By squeezing the sponge (centralising the control) we expel waste and increase efficiency, for example by concentrating information storage and processing in one place and by all using the same standard way of working. But after a while squeezing the sponge harder does not bring that effect anymore, we must make room for new ideas and new ways of working and the best way to do so is by permitting a degree of decentralisation, by releasing the sponge and let many (decentralised) flowers bloom.
A technology that makes decentralisation possible in the cloud is the Block Chain. But so far block chain technology is mainly known for Bitcoins and the somewhat anarchic atmosphere that surrounds this phenomena. In essence, a block chain is a reliable journal (ledger) of transactions, which makes it possible – without a central authority and with no predetermined confidence (trust) […]
