Nick carr points out that the current economic downturn is something of a double-edged sword for the potential growth of cloud computing:

While it’s true that the economic downturn will provide greater incentives for companies to consider cloud services as a means of reducing or avoiding capital expenditures, that’s not the whole story. Companies also tend to become more risk-averse when the economy turns bad, and that may put a brake on their willingness to experiment with cloud services.

It’s an interesting point and an important reminder that the evolution of the information and communication technology and the practices around it are subject to large external factors. That’s an obvious point, but it’s easy for it to get lost in some of the more exciting (and less troubling) talk of social technology trends.

One could point out that he’s talking about enterprise adoption here, not the behavior of individual users. However economic incentives translate into IT (or non-IT) decisions at the organizational level, people on their own could still be tending towards taking advantage of more web-based applications and participating generally in the Web 2.0 trajectory.

That, I think, ignores how individuals and organizations shape each other. Whether an employer begins to migrate towards cloud computing or not clearly influences its employees–not just because they’d be compelled to use the conventions their employer decides on, but because it contributes to their sense of what is normal and appropriate. The two directions Carr suggest that recent economic events could push could computing have their impacts magnified because of how each would influence what people are comfortable with.