Nate D’Amico passed on an interesting quote from some folks at Canonical comparing the broad cloud computing trend to the equally broad but historically proven ‘industrial revolution.’ Frankly the parallels here are self evident, (thinking about them a bit), yup—got it right?

But one particular artifact of the industrial revolution intrigues me, the Gatling gun. Although it was invented during the Civil war it was still experimental by the time of the famous rough rider charge up San Jaun hill in 1898. Why did it take so long for fire-arms to shift from single threaded to…well again you get it?

Here are some of the reasons given at the time for slow adoption:

1. Vulnerability: It was originally compared to artillery because of its form factor. By comparison it lacked firing range. It went unused for years because of this argument. It seems the New York times was up to nothing new with its cloud coverage…
2. ‘Quality’: When compared to a single barrel riffle it was considered to lack quality. Military traditions for generations exalted the virtues of bravery and a steady aim to place a single bullet with the greatest possible precision. Much of the current systems integrator culture is built around this argument.

The first big adopters of Gatling guns were small colonial outposts who had to deal with ‘the masses.’ The only way a small garrison could deal with large numbers of natives was with massive parallelism of fire. (? hmm ?) From there we all know how this story ends. ‘Suppressive fire’ eventually became the M.O. of almost every infantry unit in the world.

Its easy to say the early doubters of the Gatling gun were ‘thick’ or wrong. But more interestingly, they were entirely right, but poorly focused. The correctness of ones specific critique of a new technology can be the greatest deception of all.