The Next Revolution in our Credit-Driven Economy

Chapter 12Banking and Analytics—The PayPal Gang, Palantir versus Alibaba, and Hundsun

In his fascinating book, Who Owns the Future?, Jaron Lanier tells us that the cloud server will soak up everything in its path. It will know where the lowest price is for anything on the planet. It will become a truly global leviathan that will attract the best advertisers. It will learn all about our likes and dislikes. It is learning our price-points and preferences—our credit rating and our sneakiness. It will quantify everything about us. It will learn our skills and try to replace us. Free exchange of information brings insecurity. The server will become cheap to run, and people will remain expensive. We are willingly giving out knowledge to the server for free. We need to get with this server and remain dynamic and imaginative, or else the world has a cruel message: Salaries can seem like unjustifiable luxuries. Those who sit by idly as the cloud server accumulates more and more to itself will lose out: banking, law firms, universities, music, journalists, architecture, and so on.¹

So, the new race is the one to dominate the cloud. The cloud is a cosmic rental storage facility for billions of bits of information for thousands of companies. It is an information system that is abstracted from the buyer and is beneficial because it is a variable expense to the buyer of the service.

There are three parts of the cloud: infrastructure, platform, and software. Figure 12.1 shows the layout of ...