I was sorry to learn that Coghead, a Web 2.0 Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, announced it was shutting down. PaaS is an interesting model: a company offers a hosted service for developing, testing, running, and monitoring new applications. Customers can use the PaaS platform to launch new applications—or scale up existing ones—without deploying any local hardware or software at all. Sounds intriguing. Possibly very convenient. Possibly cost-effective.
It's proving to be too futuristic a vision. First, Bungee Labs, another PaaS provider, ran into trouble in 2008. Now Coghead is shutting its doors.
You wouldn't think this would be possible to read all the hyperventilating blog posts about cloud computing: how the time is right for cloud computing, everything will run in the cloud, what is the cloud—do we include PaaS? SaaS? If we don't define cloud computing properly, the cloud will perish! Many industry insiders are in a lather about these issues. It's as though the lottery has come up with the winning letters, which spell cloud computing, and now we have to scratch off the bonus letters just right to multiply our winnings or be sent home with a PC, jr. Nerves are a-jangle. Fingers are flying.
But if cloud computing is such an obvious remedy to the IT woes of business, why are these vendors in trouble?
Let's come down to earth for a moment. Let's consider this situation from the business customer's point of view. The business manager asks, Do I need PaaS? Is this really the most convenient, least risky way of building and deploying new applications?
I don't want to sound pedantic, but I think many cloud computing services will have trouble overcoming the obstacle that's snared many other technically impressive solutions in other IT markets of yore: just because you can build it and it's cool, doesn't mean that business customers will be comfortable with it. How many business customers in this increasingly risk-adverse environment are really going to adopt new programming paradigms and hosted services from small, evidently risky providers? Not many, I'm afraid.
Businesses want low cost and convenience. They want reliability and low risk, just as much. And (almost) nobody in business likes to learn anything new unless they have to.
I do think there are attractive opportunities for cloud computing in 2009. I'll details those in my new post. (Don't worry. It will be short.)
Note: Thanks to @chris_marino for tipping me off to the sad news about Coghead.
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