Paul Miller

Nick Carr quotes the Financial Times‘ Richard Waters this evening, reporting on a conversation with Microsoft’s Rick Rashid.

Nick finds the comments about the proportion of servers being bought by the big Cloud providers (like Microsoft) telling;

“What we’re seeing is the first stage of a rapid centralization of data-processing power – on a scale unimaginable before.”

They’re certainly interesting, but I was far more struck by;

“the ability to assemble truly vast sets of data in one place and crunch them all at once could transform science… This Utopian vision faces at least one big hindrance, though, as Rashid cautioned: many researchers feel extremely proprietary about the data they collect. How many are prepared to contribute them to a single open database for the common good?”

How, indeed, although the ‘single open database’ is a red herring.

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