Talking about “the cloud” is common around the BBQ’s I go to, (pass another beer please, the sausages need turning). However, it seems few of my verbal combatants have any idea that the cloud, is, somehow, in fact, an industrial development somewhere, creating buildings, employing people, consuming huge amounts of power, and cutting down trees in the process.
Listening to the mumbling of Tasmanian politicians this week, conflicted by the implosion of Gunns, and its implications for the Tasmanian economy, and their entrapment by green politics has been instructive in the ways of political fluffing. How can you offer an environment that encourages the enterprise from which the tax revenue to provide voter demanded services is generated, whilst not allowing those very enterprises to actually do anything?
Building a “cloud” would seem the perfect answer. No tree will ever be in danger from an axe, or even someone looking at it from the vantage point of a car, and Clouds must be good, because not only are the pretty, almost everyone seems to want one now.
Experience elsewhere indicates that all is not green in the cloud, that the industrial nature of the cloud eventually emerges, as it has here in the Tasmanian like haven of Quincy, in Washington state. When Microsoft came to town with a cloud, a chunk of money, and some commercial expectations, some realised that the world had changed.
Seems like an opportunity for Tasmania?
