[acdha]

> Take cloud for example - where did the innovation come from? It was from the top.

Definitely not. That came years later but in the late 2000s to mid-2010s it was often engineers pushing for cloud services over the executives’ preferred in-house services because it turned a bunch of helpdesk tickets and weeks to months of delays into an AWS API call. Pretty soon CTOs were backing it because those teams shipped faster.

The consultants picked it up, yes, but they push a lot of things and usually it’s only the ones which actual users want which succeed.

[HotHotLava]

I'm pretty sure OP wasn't talking about the management hierarchy, but "from the top" in the sense that it was big established companies inventing the cloud and innovating and pushing in the space, not small startups.

[acdha]

That could be, I was definitely thinking of management hierarchy since that difference has been so striking with AI.

A lot of my awareness started in the academic HPC world which was a bit ahead in needing high capacity of generic resources but it felt like this came from the edges rather than the major IT giants. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, or HP weren’t doing it, and some companies like Oracle or Cisco appeared to thought that infrastructure complexity was part of their lock on enterprise IT departments since places with complex hand run books weren’t quick to switch vendors.

Amazon at the time wasn’t seen as a big tech company - they were where you bought CDs – and companies like Joyent or Rackspace had a lot of mindshare as well before AWS started offering virtual compute in 2006. One big factor in all of this was that x86 virtualization wasn’t cheap until the mid-to-late 2000s so a lot of people weren’t willing to pay high virtualization costs, but without that you’re talking services like Bingodisk or S3 rather than companies migrating compute loads.

[pandemicsyn]

Sure Amazon was a big established co at the dawn of the cloud, and a little bit of an unexpected dark horse. None of the managed hosting providers saw Amazon coming. Also ran's like Rackspace and the like where also pretty established by that point.

But there was also cool stuff happening at smaller places like Joyent, Heroku, Slicehost, Linode, Backblaze, iron.io, etc.

[simianwords]

Sure that’s the same way GPT was invented in Google.