A Ray of Hope or Blinding Glare?
More than once over the course of the last six months we have seen little signs that there could be an end to the downward spiral of hopelessness. These are small changes in leading economic indicators, slowing of the sequential drops in housing prices, spikes in buying of specific goods and services and polls that show most Americans want to be hopeful, though most just don’t know whether to hope or not. There are actually many things to be hopeful about but they are the hardest to report and will never grab a headline. The real concern for everyone is whether these are really a Ray of Hope or the Blinding Glare of the train coming through the tunnel, bright but really not a good thing. Most of the experts I listen to have adopted the Blinding Glare interpretation of almost all these events.
In all of this their remains a reality that should should provide ..a Different View.
It seems there has never been a country or economy as openly self critical as the US, nor a people so innovative. This week I watched two economists spend an hour or so reinforcing that, without change, the economy would just kind of, quoting Michael Mandel from BusinessWeek, “slog along” toward recovery. The good news is the massive innovation already underway that will transform our country and the world in ways still not fully understood.
One example, because I also sat through a painful panel discussion of it this week (another story), is Cloud Computing. While the very essence of Cloud Computing is based on the lack of geographical coincidence required, the reality is there are few places in the world secure enough, both physically and from a legal standpoint, to host a substantial portion of the worlds business and personal processing. The realization of this profound reality should provide a significant impetus for accelerating innovation and expansion in cloud applications, beyond just the infrastructure, and realizing the economic impact of a fourth generation computing platform centered in the most secure country in the world.
This is a single example of the widespread innovation we have in early stages of adoption with more in the pipeline,: from Social Media systems to develop, integrate and monetize, to real alternative energy industries to build out, to even more radical advances in personal computing forms, to the new auto industry that is being built. No one should doubt that, if innovation is what it will take to move the economic recovery forward more quickly, we are well positioned to beat the most optimistic estimates. We should see, soon now, the ray of hope become a beacon for the future. Just a different view.
