How Cloud Computing Changed the World

The year was 2008 and the Interop tech trade show in New York City was crammed full of booths. Sales reps offered trinkets as they hawked their next-gen software and hardware. I wondered through blinking displays and the noise of a thousand buzzwords. The brand name vendors – Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, IBM – had paid big bucks for booths the size of small houses. Staffers gave product lectures backed by full-size video screens. After touring these big outfits, I investigated the smaller booths hosted by mid-sized players. With minimal staff, they worked still harder to lure you to their pitch. In an era before "Booth Babes" were outlawed, some booths included twenty-something women in skimpy sequined outfits, handing out t-shirts or glow-in-the-dark key chains. Tiny booths staffed mostly by bare bones crews. There I saw a modest booth by an outfit called Amazon Web Services. A sole rep manned it, and he wasn't wearing a company shirt.