A lack of vision
I was wrong about the cloud. Not technically wrong. Commercially wrong, which is the kind that costs you. Command Prompt was a web host. I was selling the cloud before anyone thought to call it that, and I still didn't see what was coming. We were good at adapting. Adapting is what you do when somebody else picked the direction.
It is 2009, and marketing has just invented "the cloud." Nobody really knows what the cloud is except engineers. The cloud is virtual hosting, discovered by the people who make money, who finally noticed they could make a whole lot more of it if they made the thing soft and fluffy. The thing you laid on your back and stared at as a child. "Oh look, a dragon in the sky!"
What was the cloud, really? Fancy, updated, modernized virtual hosting with cPanel. That's all. Yes, it is faster. No, it doesn't do anything it couldn't do in 1998. It does it better, largely because of progress in networking, the internet, and $$$ money $$$.
And you know what is hilarious? The term "cloud computing" dates back to 1996. Thirteen years sitting there in the open before the normies caught up and the onslaught arrived.
And boy did it arrive.
The engineers (myself included) stood on the rooftops and shouted, "People! My dear sheep of the earth, please let me save you from yourselves! Do not buy what the shiny man with the seductive words is selling!"
It was moot. The internet is now the cloud. Search, which has been around since the seventies, is now Google, an enormous money-making machine, and a verb, which is also a noun.
We lacked vision.
We were not wrong about the technology. We were right about the technology. We were right about every single thing we said, and we were right in public, and it did not matter. Being correct about how the thing works is a completely different skill from being correct about what the thing is worth. I had one of those skills. I told clients the truth about virtualization and latency and lock-in, and I watched them nod, and I watched them migrate anyway, and I watched the people who sold them the migration buy houses, buy boats, and collect RSUs.
The engineer's mistake is thinking the market is an argument you can win.
Today
You can see the seduction of AI in every CEO, president, founder, and speechwriter. It is the end of the world, except it isn't. It will replace all programmers, except it won't. Just trust us. Really? You are all psychopaths.
Now let me argue against myself.
The cloud was continuity. Same technology, faster wire, better billing model. That is why the engineers saw through it, and that is exactly why we underestimated it. We priced it as technology when it was being sold as a business model.
AI is not continuity. Whatever you want to call the last few years, it is not 1998 hosting with a nicer control panel. Something actually changed under the hood.
Take a moment and sit with that. Repackaged virtual hosting, with no new capability whatsoever, created a trillion dollars of enterprise value and reorganized how every company on earth buys infrastructure. That is what continuity did. Now ask yourself what discontinuity does, and ask yourself whether the guy on the roof yelling about hallucination rates is going to be right about the technology and wrong about the money again.
I have been that guy on the roof. I am telling you what the view is like from up there.
Tomorrow
Why put off until tomorrow what you can start today? Well, because AI started in 1955 and is only now going mainstream. Yes, there have been micro-stabs at the opportunity. Alexa and Siri are good examples. But the real fat, the lard you have to render from the swine, hits the stainless steel tomorrow.
Except it doesn't. It is already in the pan. Good business survives on two things:
- Maintaining profitable relationships
- Seizing opportunities for new profitable relationships
Those opportunities are now. They are not tomorrow, unless you want to be behind.
On this one topic, stop listening to your stodgy engineers. They are brilliant and you need to listen to them about everything they are an expert in. Especially every single question about whether the thing you are building actually works. But you don't go to your engineer and ask, "Hey, what do you think the next big thing is?" You go to your engineer and say, "I have confidence this is the next big thing. I need you to help me build it."
Your company is not AI ready. Not because you lack the infrastructure, or the data, or the talent. Those are solvable. Your company is not AI ready because you are waiting for permission from people whose entire job is caution, and they are going to give you an answer that is technically correct and commercially useless.
I know, because I used to be the one giving it.