The sky’s limit

ELECTRICITY was once generated where it was used; now it comes from the grid. So it is with computing power, once the province of mainframes and personal computers, and now moving into the “cloud”—networks of data centres that use the internet to supply all kinds of services, from e-mail and social networks to data storage and analysis.The rise of cloud computing is rapid, inexorable and causing huge upheaval in the tech industry. The old guard is suffering: this week’s $67 billion merger between Dell and EMC, makers of computers and storage devices respectively, was a marriage forced by the rise of the cloud (see article). Disruptive newcomers are blooming: if Amazon’s cloud-computing unit were a stand-alone public company, it would probably be worth almost as much as Dell and EMC combined.