Now, it's business 101 that the first entrant into a market does
necessarily win and that so called "fast followers" can quickly take
over a market.
In Cloud computing there are early guys (notably Amazon), the fast followers (notably Google), the weird followers (notably Microsoft and Apple who seem to view the cloud as simple data sync.) and then there's Yahoo!.
CNETreported that (as they put it) "finally!" Yahoo! was getting into the Cloud business. However, it you read the Yahoo! press release it rather tersely states:
[Yahoo!
will be] developing a world-class cloud computing and storage ...the
Company will form a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group
The
future tense plus the re-organization suggests - or promises - that
progress will be slow and they'll be very late to the party. Another
way of saying "late to the party" is "missing the window of
opportunity".
[This post appeared originally here and is republished in full by the kind permission of the author.]