Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Sending Letters

As the world becomes increasingly virtual, routing and distance concerns might appear to less critical. After all, who cares about ships and the Cape of Good Hope when data packets can be whisked from one corner of the earth to another in mere milliseconds?

The answer: just about everyone. Milliseconds matter in many, if not most, applications. For brokerage operations, even microseconds matter. Since milliseconds matter, miles matter also, in turn often driving a requirement for dispersed infrastructure and optimized routing.

Some simple calculations show why this is true.

Only a few years ago, when the Web was young, usage entailed a straightforward loop: Request a Web page, load the page, look at the page, click on a link and thereby request a Web page, load that page, look at the page, click on a link. A page might take seconds to load. Although users didn’t particularly enjoy the “World Wide Wait,” that was what the processing power of the endpoint, the bandwidth limitations of dial-up access, and other factors conspired to provide.

Today, the page-at-a-time paradigm has been replaced by a more highly interactive usage model. For example, today’s search engines begin providing suggestions with each keystroke—so-called autocomplete or incremental search. If you type “C-l-o-u-d-o-n-o-m-i-c-s” into a search engine query box, each letter generates some suggested returns. As you type “C,” your search engine might suggest “Craigslist,” “Chase,” and “CNN.” After the ...