Yeah, big data and massive parallelism in the cloud are exciting!
But there are two problems with the cloud:
- Technical: doing stuff in centralized data centers, when all of your users have multiple, hugely overprovisioned computing devices is a bit of a joke.
- Political: do you actually want to have all your users' data, and take on the huge responsibilities and risks associated with that?
The cloud is really a reaction to browsers' highly limited request-response interaction style. But browsers have changed now, they're becoming little operating systems.
May I suggest to take a fresh look at small data and humble sequentialism in 2012?