"If Truman was the Nuclear President, Kennedy the Space President, and Eisenhower the Interstate President, Obama will be the Cloud President." -VGR

Venkatesh Rao wrote a nice little piece in 2008 providing an overview of the presidential technological eras and arguing that Obama would be the first cloud president. The piece aged very well so I thought I'd share some of the key excerpts.

“Obama has a few technological levers he can push, as he looks for ways to deal with his big problems: two wars, an economy in meltdown, a looming energy crisis, and a looming demographic crisis (retiring boomers).

The first technology lever is investment in the long-latency, capital-intensive alternative and clean energy sector. Obama will be able to start things here, but he will not be able to finish them. It will take more than eight years to wean the world off oil and get it addicted to a cocktail of other energy sources. Any dramatic economic and cultural shifts that may create will be indelibly associated with the reign of his successor.

The second lever is the cloud. Building out the cloud (or The Cloud, as it may come to be called before he is leaves office) is an undertaking as daunting as the building out of the Interstate highway system. The Interstate highway system was built in three waves too — country lanes and plank roads gave way to the older national highway system, which gave way to the Interstate system.

But the good news is that The Cloud will take less time and money to build than a new global energy portfolio, and deliver its value far more quickly. Its cultural and economic impact will be quick and dramatic: the emergence of cloudworker lifestyles and culture. Its economic impact will be quick too.”

I have fond memories of that low interest rate addled, cloud server accelerated era with lots of free and heavily subsidized offers for everything from meal delivery to gym memberships and everything in between. What a great time to be in your twenties and alive! Lots of “assisted living for millennials” as Kara Swisher has said. There was also the infrastructure laid down for numerous SaaS successes and the now ramping up AI revolution.

President Obama also brought cloud and modern digital practices into the federal government in the wake of the spectacular Healthcare dot gov failure to launch. Those reforms like new technology talent pipelines and dedicated digital services within the federal government are among what I’d venture will be the biggest long term legacies of President Obama. (Those initiatives were among the few that were not overturned reflexively by DJT and actually that cloud-first digitally native approach was embraced by Jared Kushner in DJT v1.0.)

Looking more broadly at Obama's technological legacy, the solar cost revolution is real and transformative. The Solyndra failure was really sad, most of all because it showed how poorly the dominant American discourse think about public risk these days. It's fine if a company or two fails on the road to big transformation. It emphatically was not associated with his successor though perhaps Made in America EVs will get rebranded in the Elon-Trump show.

Venkat also had these very good sentences about Obama's legacy, which aged very well in my opinion:

“A figure seen (with either suspicion or worship) as messianic faces an unforgiving set of expectations. Obama’s acceptance speech last night was surreal — Lincolnesque and Kennedyesque, complete with Oprah and Jesse Jackson tears and soaring yes we can! rhetoric. Historical significance granted, a quick descent to earth is necessary.”