It’s easy to assume this blog concerns the potential financial collapse of Greece and its devastating effects on the EU and the world.  As tantalizing a topic as that is, I’m going to discuss another kind of clouds, Personal or P-Clouds that offer more promise than problem and more silver lining than gloom.  Though “disruptive” from a technological standpoint, this type of disruption creates the opportunity to benefit the chaos of change.  The Personal Cloud market could reach $12B by 2016 (Don Rowinski citing Forrester) and will require a third wave of major client software, a new delivery channel and the “turbulence selling to individuals”.  That turbulence allows the entrance of new market movers who have the ability to move with speed and differentiation. Civil War General Nathan Bedford Forrest suggested the winner is the one who gets “there firstest with the mostest". That “mostest” in this context is differentiated services or the ability to project a differentiated service and the provisioning of the differentiated service in the initial offering. 

I see the most powerful differentiation as the ability to simply and elegantly converge or synthesize the spheres of work, personal and social networking.  Think of your PC as a planet in your networked solar system, not the hub.  Those other planets, just to name a few, include multiple PCs, iPads, iPods, smartphones, automatic back-up, identity protection, Facebook, Twitter, CRM and the other apps/software associated with them.  To me the challenge resembles a national intelligence problem where the issue is often not intelligence or information, but the inability to fuse thousands (perhaps millions) of individual data feeds into common operational picture.  In our new P-Cloud based solar system, with the right tools, we have the ability to fuse work, personal and social information into a synergistic collective that is technologically transcendent.  Think P-Cloud (PC) three dimensional (PC3D).  Preparation for a sales meeting with a customer looks more like a hologram than a PowerPoint presentation.  A “snapshot” of family includes their location, genealogy, status, birthdates, etc.  None these functionalities is that impressive in its own right, but I believe the fusion of the functions is intriguing.  It will be interesting to see who can get there the firstest with the mostest.