The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

by Kevin Kelly

There are practical limits to how gigantic one company’s cloud can get, so the next step in the rise of clouds over the coming decades will be toward merging the clouds into one intercloud. Just as the internet is the network of networks, the intercloud is the cloud of clouds. Slowly but surely Amazon’s cloud and Google’s cloud and Facebook’s cloud and all the other enterprise clouds are intertwining into one massive cloud that acts as a single cloud—The Cloud—to the average user or company. A counterforce resisting this merger is that an intercloud requires commercial clouds to share their data (a cloud is a network of linked data), and right now data tends to be hoarded like gold. Data hoards are seen as a competitive advantage, and sharing data freely is hampered by laws, so it will be many years (decades?) before companies learn how to share their data creatively, productively, and responsibly.