Many have written about the barriers to true adoption of a cloud-based world. The biggest barrier is the lack of bandwidth and connectivity in various parts of the globe.
It was great then to read Bill Gates’ thoughts about a diverse range of cloud based offerings, dependent on the capacity of the local networks. Gates said;
…if you look at the really utilitarian uses of the Internet, a lot of those can be done at fairly low bandwidth, even with a cell phone in a rural village in say Africa or India looking at the crop prices or your health records or getting advice and things like that. So, we will have to start to think of the Internet as including parts that are not super high bandwidth and adopting applications for that, and then another part which is more in the rich-world urban type area where you can assume [the availability] of very high bandwidth.
Of course this discussion pre-supposes some degree of connectivity, but if you take the leap for a moment of considering that a fait accompli, then Gates’ vision of a range of capacity differentiated services makes lots of sense – and for that matter so does Microsoft’s entire software + services strategy.