A long time back I had what I felt was a brilliant insight which ran as follows.  Cloud computers and their operating systems are a different and unique species.  The be unlike anything we have seen before.  This will discomfort observers who think they understand what is important in an operating system or a computer.  The niche this species lives in has opportunities that will cause rapid evolution of new things and drive a lot of old things to become vistigal.

Further I felt it was obvious that a cloud computing offering from vendor A would be very very different than the offering from vendor B.  Not for the usual reasons either.  The usual reasons is standardization is hard and it is work for the early movers dismiss for many reasons.  In this case the diversity would arise because vendors would have existing hard to reproduce assets which they could bundle into their offering.  Amazon, for example, could bundle their supply chain.  Google could bundle their cache of the web and the search tools upon that.

These predictions haven’t turned out to be as accurate as I expected them too.  The evolution has been fast, but not as fast and disruptive as I expected.  And the second prediction, e.g. that we would see interesting complex vendor specific APIs emerging in the cloud operating systems has  occurred  far less than I expected it to.

But this real time search API on Google’s App Engine looks interesting.