In a former life, I made a prediction about Amazon putting together computation, messaging and storage in a utility pricing framework. This was before Amazon EC2, and Amazon Web Services more generally, came into being. My prediction, if not dead on, was pretty accurate.
At that time, it was a little unclear what the impact of Amazon’s offerings would be. A little less than four years later and now the White House is deploying systems to EC2. And it’s not just some piddly site, but Recovery.gov. Not to mention there’s now a whole “cloud computing” industry in which EC2 is the standard bearer.
To this day, I still think EC2 is one of the coolest things to happen in computing in a long time. We overestimate the impact of change in the short run, and underestimate the impact in the long run.