2010 will be remembered as the breakthrough of cloud computing. This was the year people gained a shared understanding of the concept, and most major players were investing heavily into its expected transformative effects. Nobody personify the rise of the cloud hype more than Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. Entering 2010 he was known to ridicule cloud computing in public rants.

Few columnists really get China – one who does is Nicholas D. Kristof of NY Times. In a couple of recent opinion pieces he has covered the apparent contradiction between the hysterical paranoia of the party elite and the almost miraculous speed of progress and development that is evident on the ground.

Our friends at Innovation Works (www.innovation-works.com) are celebrating their first birthday these days. They will mark the event by going public with their first batch of interesting and creative ventures – primarily entering the Chinese consumer and mobile internet space, currently dominated by Baidu (search), Tencent (social), Taobao (eCommerce) and China Mobile (mobile internet).

The blogosphere was flooded with sarcastic comments when Microsoft announced the future Windows Azure Platform Applicance offering at WPC earlier this month, quickly dubbed “Azure-in-a-Box”. eBay and large datacenters will implement Windows Azure cloud infrastructures in large server centers, supported by HP, Dell and Fujitsu.  But cloud in a box sounds like a contradiction, right? Cloud computing was supposed to provide endless scale and elasticity, how could you get this if confined to a single container? 

 I think the more dogmatic cloud prophets are missing the larger point. Yes, global clouds provide scale benefits and reduce cost– but the BIG disruption is the potential of a standardized application platform across public and private domains. So, what will this do?

Even though I’m more interested in both economics and politics than the average person, I have to admit that most often I find macro-economic analysis fairly abstract, communicated in numbers and percentages that seem distant from the reality of everyday life. But traveling between China and Europe these days I certainly don’t need a chief economist to tell me the story. 

In enterprise collaboration the mantra has generally been to make any information available. The idea has been that if you store all knowledge in an indexed electronic format, knowledge will prevail and add value to the organization. And it has. But is this really collaboration?

What has been built is generally the enterprise Google. But fundamentally Google is a library. Documents transfer information between the user and provider of knowledge. It’s not a dialogue. And it certainly isn’t personal.

There was a time when enterprise software was cutting edge and state-of-the-art. In fact, until the last couple of years, enterprise IT was pushing adaption into consumer IT. Most people had their first experience with mobility, internet, email and document software in a corporate environment before becoming direct consumers.