Today in Infrastructure
Derrick Harris- Thursday, September 17, 2009
Although I maintain reservations about whether to call them “cloud” services, HP’s MagCloud and On Demand Books, of which Google is now a partner, are great services nonetheless. How great is it that custom publishers can sell their magazine without having to do so at printing-press scale? Or that librophiles can stop in the bookstore and (almost) instantly have their hands on a long out-of-print title? Print might be dying, but part of the reason is the enormous overhead involved (thanks to printing, marketing, etc.) balanced against a decrease in demand. With on-demand models, however, the overhead is essentially nil, and consumers don’t have to pay for it in the final price — and we have the web to thank. Hmm … maybe this model is more cloud-like (or SaaS-like) than I thought.
