Elephant and six blind men and the cloud parable

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I am not sure how many in the reader group knows the story of the Elephant and the six blind men. This story is about six blind men who have heard from their family members and friends on how amazed they were when they saw an elephant and the blind men have heard stories about the elephant. When they were with their friends and their friends gasped at how big the elephant was and how majestically it walked and at some point these blind men decided among themselves that they needed to feel the elephant and hence they asked their friends to arrange for an elephant so that they could feel it and decide for themselves if the elephant was as majestic as they had heard their friends describe an elephant. Finally the elephant was arranged for the six blind men to touch and feel. and on that day the six blind men started to explore the different parts of an elephant touching the elephant and creating an understanding for themselves based on their touch of the elephant. As luck would have it the six blind people explored the different parts of the elephant one touched its ears and the elephant fanned them and created a wind blast for the blind man and he immediately said that the Elephant was like a Fan which blew wind. There was another gentleman who felt the Elephants tail and exclaimed the elephant is like a rope, the one touching its tusk exclaimed that the elephant was like a spear. The one who felts its legs exclaimed the elephant was like a tree trunk, the one feeling its side said an elephant was like a wall and the one feeling its trunk said the elephant was like a snake. Thus unable to see the whole elephant and touching a certain part of the elephant made the six blind people who touched the elephant make different assumptions about what an elephant was. Given its enormity, the six bind men could not make a comprehensive picture of the elephant in their minds. And this same thing is happening in a another elephant in front of us called the cloud.

And all the tech companies are like the above six blind men story giving their own interpretation of the cloud. Each company has its own interpretation of the cloud

Now let us take each set of companies here , the first set is telecom operator companies and their suppliers like Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei. These companies provide communication equipment like 3G,4G,5G etc. to access data and hence they feel they enable the cloud and are cloud companies. Ericsson and Nokia offer their own cloud platform which is not performing well. Neither are the cloud platforms of the Telecom operators performing well. We then come to the Public cloud companies like AWS Google and Microsoft. If you recollect a few years ago Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg were talking about the Metaverse and how it was going to change the world but after a few months the talk stopped, and I was wondering why did it stop? And I was also following a company called second life and while the company talked of possibilities of a second universe in the cloud, the company never took off or was not adopted by people and that is where I found the answer to Satya Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg's nodding off on the promise of the metaverse. The question was would companies just use the metaverse just because a technology company had invested some amount on creating a platform and where Microsoft and face book would sell devices like oculus head sets to the users to build their own castles in the cloud. And that is where the concept of Virtual Ownership came about. I as an individual would not buy some headsets to wander into a Microsoft or meta created metaverse to build my own virtual home. Unless I owned a part of the world and had some monetary rent flowing in from my virtual asset, I would not be willing to invest any time or money in that world. That is the realization that people were not biting when Microsoft and Facebook stopped the praise of the metaverse.

The third set of companies were companies like Snowflake which started streamlining the process of having multiple cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft or google and optimizing the data storage and efficiency across these cloud companies.

And the fourth set of companies are AI companies called the AI companies. I asked Chap GPT to explain in a picture the connection between AI companies and the cloud and it generated this image.

What was interesting looking at the image was revenue growth has no reason and is taken as a fact that drives growth.

So summing up as we have seen in the six blind men and elephant story, a similar story is there in the cloud with the blind companies like the telecom players, the technology players and the data lakes streamlining companies and the AI players having their own interpretation of the Cloud. What most of them do not realise is the part Virtual Ownership of Data will play in the business of the metaverse and tying the whole cloud picture together.