Cloud computing's naysayers encourage misplaced fears that IT careers are threatened by cloud adoption. Don't believe it. The economic argument for clouds as career opportunities is clear; the need for insightful expertise to realize the cloud's full potential is becoming widely recognized.

But when it comes to rebutting cynical FUD, theory is nowhere near as strong as practice—and the practice of IT is clearly moving cloudwards, as witness this current job posting:

Job Title Project Manager
Location Arlington, VA
Position Id 5788

Job Description
Resolvit is looking for a full time employee to work as a Project Manager at our client site in Rosslyn, VA. The successful candidate will utilize their practical experience to manage the development and deployment of ad hoc enhancements and changes to the recently deployed enterprise wide CRM tool (Salesforce.com). A major conversion from Seibel was done and there are many new opportunities for a project manager to get control of, prioritize, and manage to success.

Duties:

· Develop detailed project plans to include timelines, resource allocation estimates, budgetary analysis, risk factor identification and risk factor mitigation strategies.
· Gathering requirements, specifications and best practice documentation from multiple stakeholders on how to enhance and roll out new features for Salesforce.com CRM tool
· Perform gap analysis and produce strategies and tactical plans to enhance the customer's experience
· Create and manage the task schedule of deliverables as well as monitor the budget for each new program
· Working with groups of 3-10 users to facilitate acceptance and delivery of new CRM tool modifications
· Provide progress reports to management, escalate issues as needed, identify and minimize risk factors, assess project changes and their impact to schedule and budget
· Reviewing the quality and consistency of all changes and enhancements throughout the development process

Please notice two things: the valuable contributions of an IT professional are still right up there on the list; the low-value, career-stagnating parts of the job are not.

To me, this looks like the beginning of a revival of the opportunity—and even, perhaps, the joy—of pursuing an IT career.

Reasonable people may cordially disagree on the merits, as a measure, of the Dow Jones Industrial Average—which is in the news, this week, even more than usual after its return (however transient) to the zone above 10,000.

Yes, this threshold is arbitrary; worse, it's surprisingly slippery, thanks to the frequent changes in membership of the group of 30 stocks whose prices go into the calculation.

Regardless, let's take advantage of the huge mind-share of the DJIA, and use it as a lens through which to view the past and speculate on the future.

Calculating the DJIA is trivial on any given day, but it poses tricky questions if you want play "what if?" with alternate histories. I got into this game back in November 1999, when Microsoft and Intel were brought into the Group of 30 for the first time in place of Chevron and Union Carbide. In a PC Week column a few days later, I expressed displeasure with Dow Jones Corp. for chasing (as it seemed to me) the glitter and glitz of the tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite. (The latter index would peak, as we doubtless all remember, only four months later at a height that it has never since approached.)

I've since noted, for example in an eWEEK column in March 2005 (so far as I know, not available on line) that subsequent struggles of the DJIA would have been far less labored if Microsoft and Intel had not been holding it back. If we look back to December 2003, for example, when the DJIA crossed above 10,000 for the third time in its history, we can ask ourselves: what would have happened since then if Microsoft and Intel had been re-replaced by the stocks that were voted off the island four years earlier?

Others may approach this calculation differently, but as I compute this, today's DJIA would have topped 10,120 if MSFT and INTC had been sent back to the stock yard.

But wait, there's more. What if MSFT and INTC were replaced, not by two solid though unexciting petrochemical players, but instead by two exemplars of the cloud? Say, Amazon and salesforce.com? The latter did not go public until 2004, so this calculation has even more ways to do it than the one before—but as I can best run the numbers, a DJIA that had turned its eyes cloudward at its previous 10,000 breakthrough would today be nearing 10,760. We might not be dancing in the streets, but some of the parties that were held this week could have been more pleasant summer barbeques.

For investors, perhaps this mind game is a useful reminder that indicators aren't the same as measures. Sure, the DJIA is based on objective measures, but the continual re-composition of the DJIA massages those measures into well-informed opinions. There's nothing wrong with that, unless you misunderstand what the number means.

For everyone else, I offer this as an exercise in thinking about what will drive our economy forward during the decade to come. The "Wintel" model of thick-client computing had a good long run, but its day is nearly done. "We expect Windows and Office to be empty shells" a decade from now, says Toan Tran, an equity research analyst at Chicago's Morningstar Inc.

There's more to the market than simple numbers, but numbers are the basis of all real knowledge. Don't get caught in a shell game.

I spend a lot of time on airplanes, en route to give conference keynotes and other such briefings, most of which are centered on the question of "What's this cloud computing thing and what will it do for me?"

On one rare recent occasion, not only did I get to talk about this with just a short drive up the freeway to Los Angeles, but our partner colleagues at American Data Company also did a super job of combining the slideware with the speech. This talk starts with the big picture of the IT economy, lays out both the diversity of cloud computing offerings and also their common tenets, and ends with an update on our Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Custom Cloud perspectives.

Hot Topics in Enterprise Cloud Computing (PaaS and SaaS) from American Data Company on Vimeo.

Best of all, unlike the real thing, a video version of my talk has a "pause" function, and doesn't expect hot coffee before it starts. PDF of the slides available for download as well, for those who want to play our game at home.

People often use the phrase, "positive feedback," to mean the mere act of praising good (or even mediocre) work. In technical settings, the phrase has a more precise and rather different meaning: positive feedback makes small changes self-reinforcing, with an everyday example being the howls and screeches that come from a public-address system when the microphone gets too close to the speaker.

The power of positive feedback came to mind earlier this morning, when I joined a standing-room-only crowd at Northrop Grumman's Space Park complex in Redondo Beach for the 4:30am'ish end of the LCROSS mission: a pair of lunar impacts, the first of a spent upper-stage rocket and the second of an instrumented probe designed to sniff the debris plume for water.

As we neared the moment of impact, several people involved in the mission were sharing their lessons learned from this fast-track project that achieved under-budget, ahead-of-schedule results—despite aggressive targets that some thought unlikely to be met. "People said we couldn't do something this small, this fast," was the recollection of one of the engineers. "When we announced that the spacecraft was ready for delivery early, it ricocheted all the way up to NASA headquarters."

I found myself thinking of positive feedback. When you know you're trying to do something in two years, rather than ten years, you feel more motivated to work for an extra twenty minutes to get something done today—instead of planning to do it before lunch tomorrow. The extra effort feels as if it's worthwhile.

I wonder if this may be one of the reasons that cloud computing projects get done more quickly than anyone expects, or even believes to be possible. An extra twenty minutes, before morning coffee or during a working lunch or squeezed in before you go home, can make a contribution that's really tangible when you're working in a high-leverage framework like Force.com. Every action yields perceptible progress.

This is pretty much the polar opposite of the joke (at least, I think it's meant as a joke) that asks "What's a man-year of effort at [insert big slow organization name here]? That's 700 people saying they can get it done before lunchtime." Massive, legacy-burdened projects always seem to take longer than anyone thought, and throwing more people at them just makes them take even longer.

People ask me how Force.com achieves fivefold acceleration of development, compared to platforms like Java or .Net: I tell them it's not just the programming model. It's the whole environment in which reusing data, and multiplying the value of existing processes by linking them easily with additional resources, gives every increment of effort more impact than it's ever had before. Positive feedback indeed.

It's staggering to read the descriptions of the multi-city-block, polar-icecap-melting monuments to code bloat that are being built to run 20^th-century software in a poor imitation of 21^st-century cloud computing. When I got my undergraduate degree in civil engineering, I hoped someday to build nuclear power plants: I never imagined that a Chicago server farm would soon be "the first point of consumption for the nuclear-fueled Elmhurst power grid, initially taking 30 megawatts of power, enough power to supply 20,000 U.S. homes, with plans to take 30 megawatts more."

There's a better way. Instead of running N copies of a traditional, general-purpose operating system for N separate users of that operating system, a multi-tenant kernel can do the job with a tiny fraction of that amount of code on a tiny fraction of that amount of hardware. As noted by one attendee at an event in New York this March, "all of salesforce.com runs on only about 1,000 servers. And that is mirrored, so it is really only 500. Think about that for a minute. Salesforce has more than 55,000 enterprise customers, 1.5 million individual subscribers, 30 million lines of third-party code, and hundreds of terabytes of data all running on 1,000 machines." (Today, it's more like 63,000 customers and more than 80 million lines of Force.com code, but it's the basic ratios rather than the absolute numbers that matter here.)

Compared to the massive old model, running applications in the new multi-tenant model is like putting people in business-class seats on an A380 from L.A. to Singapore—versus putting the same people, in their cars, on a ferry boat that goes about one-tenth as fast. Sure, a turbine-powered hydrofoil ship is a beautiful piece of engineering, just like that data center in Chicago—but isn't the destination more important than the machine that gets you there?

And doesn't it make sense to get there faster, more efficiently, at lower cost? By not defining the problem in terms that make you keep on carrying the burdens of past practice?

The differential savings of new versus old are only going to increase. As Ed Sperling asks over on Forbes.com, what happens when carbon taxes start to do a better job of fully internalizing costs that today are not fully visible in the prices we pay for electric power?

Putting thousands of copies of a 20^th-century operating system in one big place, and calling it a cloud, looks to me an awful lot like putting wings and jet engines on the Titanic and calling it an A380.  Burn enough fuel, and you might even make it fly—but the day of the flying boat came and went with startling speed. Other notions may pass just as quickly, no matter how clever the engineering...or how impressive the monuments that are built to the bad idea.