The virtue of fear as a source of animating energy has long been recognized in the quicksilver tech industry. "Only the paranoid survive," as Andrew S. Grove, Intel's longtime leader, put it - a guiding principle that was also the title of his 1996 book on management.
The fear factor is clearly at work now in the fast-growing market for cloud computing. The latest quarterly reports from technology companies and market research show that two of the fastest movers in the emergent cloud business are the incumbent giants of traditional software, Microsoft and IBM. Their business is most at risk from the shift to computing delivered over the Internet from distant data centers, with the business model of a pay-for-use service rather than a product.
Microsoft's cloud revenue jumped 164 percent in the second quarter, while IBM's surged 86 percent, according to a report last week by the Synergy Research Group. Amazon is still way ahead, with $962 million in cloud revenue, compared with $370 million for Microsoft, and IBM's $259 million, Synergy estimates. But Amazon's growth rate, at 49 percent, was only slightly ahead of the torrid 45 percent pace of the cloud market as a whole.