If you were stranded on a desert island and could only take 2 apps with you, which would you pick?
A dinner out with colleagues on a recent business trip made me reflect on the impact of the explosion of apps on our daily lives. We had just touched down in San Jose, California, at about 6pm and we realized no one had made dinner arrangements. Someone was craving sushi, so I pulled up the Yelp! app on my iPhone in the cab ride to the hotel. We selected a highly rated restaurant, and then switched over to MapQuest to guide the taxi driver to the quiet strip mall where it was located. As we were calling for the check several plates of sushi later, another colleague used Uber to summon a black car to take us back to the hotel. The car arrived just as we finished paying the bill. On the 5-minute drive back, the guy who got stuck with the check snapped a photo of the receipt and logged it in Concur with his other expenses from the trip. I couldn’t help but wonder how we even functioned before apps!
As Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, points out, cloud computing has fundamentally changed the nature of software by moving it off the desktop and out into massive data centers with unprecedented processing power. This shift combined with the proliferation of Internet-enabled mobile devices has produced the explosion of apps that we are currently witnessing.
The app boom, however, has thus far been largely focused on the individual consumer. How can businesses leverage apps to facilitate communications, efficiency and collaboration among their employees? And what are the implications of the growth of apps on the demand for cloud computing services? Watch Nicholas Carr discuss the explosion of apps.
And as far as that desert island goes…I would take my Kindle and Facebook apps with me!
Watch the entire video series to learn more about Carr’s views on the cloud revolution.
