Wikipedia lists the “5th Estate” as an ambiguous addition to the traditional “estates,” including the clergy (1st Estate), nobility (2nd Estate), commoners (3rd Estate), and the press (4th Estate). The term (according to Wikipedia)has been used to describe 
trade unions, the poor, the blogosphere and organized crime. It can also be used to describe media outlets that see themselves in opposition to mainstream (“Fourth Estate”) media.
If you believe Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, their vision is to marry artificial intelligence with search engines so powerful they would understand “everything in the world.” A couple of years ago Google further stated a corporate vision to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
A very compelling and interesting vision, until you begin to understand the extent of that capability. On a positive note it gives us a way find and access codified knowledge we’d never gain exposure to under normal conditions (pre-Google and Internet “normal conditions”), but on the other end of the spectrum personal information and confidential information is also collected, indexed, and made available to anybody with access to a search engine.
Posting a blog entry may get you indexed within seconds, as would posting pictures of your family. Your tax records, home information, educational records, and other personal information, if not guarded with near military discipline (oops, forgot about wikileaks.com), will expose parts of your life never expected to the other 4.5 billion people around the world who may have a voyeuristic or nefarious interest in your life.
Going Nose-to-Nose with a Sovereign Nation
However, perhaps the most interesting step into uncharted territory with Google is in their recent conflict with China.
Google took issue with China’s censorship of search engine results, as well as cyber-terrorism it alleged was raged by Chinese government hackers, who obtained confidential information and email data from Google as well as at least 20 other private companies in what Google described “as a highly sophisticated attack.” (Red Herring)
The issue here is not censorship, the issue is the rights of a sovereign nation, versus the development of a global utility that transcends the control of a nation over its citizens. Kind of a new United Nations of Cyber managed by Google.
China is a good target, as self-righteous citizens of western countries reject the socialist political/cultural environment in the world’s most populous country. Of course those who believe in western conspiracy would note that Google has been linked to the CIA and other global intelligence agencies since inception (1), (2), (3), etc., by a variety of mainstream media and private websites.
But what does happen when a private company reaches a level of power that allows it to set both foreign and domestic policy in sovereign nations? Is there a point when the UK, must check with Google for approval before signing privacy or security policy into law? At what point does a private company “cross over the line” of providing a global utility and become a global “big brother?”
Max Headroom Returns to Our Ether
We’ve written about Max Headroom in the past, and he recently pop-p-p-p-ped up in conversations and magazine artiocles, including Wired Magazine. Max Headroom’s world, although brought to us in 1985, is almost creepy in its relevance to modern times. Just swap Television, studios, and TV with Internet and SEO ratings.
“In the post-apocalyptic future where television sets are more important than food, TV ratings are the all important currency of the nation. A new technique of preventing viewers from channel surfing proves somewhat detrimental to particularly sedentary couch potatoes. The top studio becomes concerned: dead viewers make for low ratings. Edison Carter, top news reporter, is sent to find out more. After a motorcycle accident, his mind is preserved by wizz-kid Bryce and becomes his wise cracking, computer generated alter-ego: Max Headroom, who manages to boost ratings above those of any live hosts to date…”
Is Google and Google SEO the new global currency? Is Google search engine placement more important to a company than Euros, RMB, or Dollars? Is Google the next Max Headroom, an omnipresent component of all aspects of our life, more important than our national or cultural identity?
Maybe it is Time to Change
Our lives are now wired with laptop computers, smart phones, Netbooks, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Internet. You cannot walk a block without being presented with license plates, billboards, handouts, or airplanes pulling banners or skywriting URLs flogging some Internet site or service. Part of every person’s life in our current world. And Bluetooth has drilled it into our heads with Skype and other applications transcending the government controlled communications infrastructure with packetized everything-over-IP applications.
Binding this together brings Facebooks and Googles into the basic infrastructure of the new world, almost to the point of transcending the value of fiber optics, wireless networks, routers, servers, and switches.
While uncomfortable to us 50-somethings, we are witnessing a harbinger of the future. The future is wired. The future is a global community with little respect for borders and culture. The wired world is the 5th Estate. Only question is if Google or Facebook will join the first four estates as individual companies as representatives of the 5th Estate.
The message from the VC community is clear – “don’t waste our seed money on network and server equipment.” The message from the US Government CIO was clear – the US Government will consolidate data centers and start moving towards cloud computing. The message from the software and hardware vendors is clear – there is an enormous 
investment in cloud computing technologies and services.
If nothing else, the economic woes of the past two years have taught us we need to be a lot smarter on how we allocate limited CAPEX and OPEX budgets. Whether we choose to implement our IT architecture in a public cloud, enterprise cloud, or not at all – we still must consider the alternatives. Those alternatives must include careful consideration of cloud computing.
Cloud 101 teaches us that virtualization efficiently uses compute and storage resources in the enterprise. Cloud 201 teaches us that content networks facing the Internet can make use of on-demand compute and storage capacity in close proximity to networks. Cloud 301 tells us that a distributed cloud gives great flexibility to both enterprise and Internet-facing content. The lesson plan for Cloud 401 is still being drafted.
Data Center 2010
Data center operators traditionally sell space based on cabinets, partial cabinets, cages, private suites, and in the case of carrier hotels, space in the main distribution frame. In the old days revenue was based on space and cross connects, today it is based on power consumed by equipment.
If the intent of data center consolidation is to relieve the enterprise or content provider of unnecessary CAPEX and OPEX burden, then the data center sales teams should be gearing up for a feeding frenzy of opportunity. Every public cloud service provider from Amazon down to the smallest cloud startup will be looking for quality data center space, preferably close to network interconnection points.
In fact, in the long run, if the vision of cloud computing and virtualization is true, then the existing model of data center should be seen as a three-dimensional set of objects within a resource grid, not entirely dissimilar to the idea set forth by Nicholas Carr in his book the “Big Switch.”
Facilities will return to their roots of concrete, power, and air-conditioning, adding cloud resources (or attracting cloud service providers to provide those resources), and the cabinets, cages, and private suites will start being dismantled to allow better use of electrical and cooling resources within the data center.
Rethinking the Data Center
Looking at 3tera‘s AppLogic utility it brings a strange vision to mind. If I can build a router, switch, server, and firewall into my profile via a drag and drop utility, then why would I want to consider buying my own hardware?
If storage becomes part of the layer 2 switch, then why would I consider installing my own SAN, NAS, or fiber channel infrastructure? Why not find a cloud service provider with adequate resources to run my business within their infrastructure, particularly if their network proximity and capacity is adequate to meet any traffic requirement my business demands?
In this case, if the technology behind AppLogic and other similar Platform as a Service (PaaS) is true to the marketing hype, then we can start throwing value back to the application. The network, connectivity, and the compute/storage resource becomes an assumed commodity – much like the freeway system, water, or the electrical grid.
Flowing the Profile to the User
Us old guys used to watch a SciFi sitcom called “Max Headroom.” Max Headroom was a fictional character who lived within the “Ether,” being able to move around though computers, electrical grids – and pop up wherever in the network he desired. Max could also absorb any of the information within computer systems or other electronic intelligence sources, and
deliver his findings to news reporters who played the role of investigative journalists.
We are entering an electronic generation not too different from the world of Max Headroom. If we use social networking, or public utility applications such as Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo Mail, our profile flows to the network point closest to our last request for application access. There may be a permanent image of our data stored in a mother ship, but the most active part of our profile is parsed to a correlation database near our access point.
Thus, if I am a Gmail user, and live in Los Angeles, my correlated profile is available at the Google data cache with correlated Gmail someplace with proximity to Los Angeles. If I travel to HongKong, then Gmail thinks “Hmmm…, he is in HK, and we should parse his Gmail image to our HK cache, and hope he gets the best possible performance out of the Gmail product from that point.”
I, as the user, do not care which data center my Gmail profile is cached at, I only care that my end user experience is good and I can get my work done without unnecessary pain.
The data center becomes virtual. The application flows to the location needed to do the job and make me happy. XYZ.Com, who does my mail day-to-day, must understand their product will become less relevant and ineffective if their performance on a global scale does not meet international standards. Those standards are being set by companies who are using cloud computing on a global, distributed model, to do the job.
2010 is the Year Data Centers Evolve to Support the Cloud
The day of a 100sqft data center cage is rapidly becoming as senseless as buying a used DMS250. The cost in hardware, software, peopleware, and the operational expense of running a small data center presence simply does not make sense. Nearly everything that can be done in a 100sqft cage can be done in a cloud, forcing the services provider to concentrate on delivering end user value, and leaving the compute, storage, and network access to utility providers.
And when the 100sqft cage is absorbed into a more efficient resource, the cost – both in electrical/mechanical and cost (including environmental costs) will drop by a factor of nearly 50%, given the potential for better data center management using strict hot/cold aisle separation, hot or cold aisle containment, containers – all those things data center operators are scrambling to understand and implement.
Argue the point, but by the end of 2010, the ugly data center caterpillar will come out of its cocoon as a better, stronger, and very cloudy utility for the information technology and interconnected world to exploit.
