Alvin Toffler's "The Third Wave" points out that the agricultural phase starting about 10,000 years ago and the industrial phase starting at the end of the 17th century are considered the first and second waves, while the informatization phase starting in the late 1950s is the third wave.

From this perspective, the information technology (IT) industry is a young industry, only about 60-70 years old, roughly the same age as the People's Republic of China. In 1956, Premier Zhou personally presided over the formulation of the "Twelve-Year Science and Technology Development Plan," which listed computers as one of the key areas for developing science and technology, and in 1957, China's first computing technology research institute was established. The popularization of computers in China did not happen until the mid-to-late 1980s.

1. The Third Wave of ICT Technology

The development of computer hardware is generally divided into four stages: vacuum tube digital machines (1946-1958), transistor digital machines (1958-1964), integrated circuit digital machines (1964-1970), and large-scale integrated circuit machines (1970 to present). According to Moore's Law, the number and performance of components that can be accommodated on an integrated circuit will approximately double every 18-24 months. Huawei has launched the Ascend 910, an AI chip built using 7nm process technology with the highest single-chip computing density, standing at the forefront of world technology.

As information technology covering hardware, software, networks, and applications as a whole, it is still in rapid development and change, with various different stage divisions in history. Some divide IT development into hardware, software, internet, mobile internet, and IoT stages, while others divide it into terminal/host, client/server, and browser/server stages. Standing from a historical height, there are limitations in regarding small splashes before one's eyes as major wave stages. In fact, the differences between client/server, browser/server, and mobile/server are not as significant as imagined, insufficient to constitute a wave. Currently, it seems more reasonable to divide IT historical development into three waves: mainframe, server, and cloud computing. After 10 years of germination and 10 years of development, cloud computing's qualification as the third wave of IT technology development can basically be confirmed.

In the 1940s, IBM founder Watson said that the world only needs 5 computers. This refers to mainframes, such as the IBM 3270 mainframe still widely used in the financial sector today. In the mainframe era, equipment adopted closed, dedicated parallel computing structures, with all computing power concentrated on large mainframes. As the human-machine interface, terminal devices only had basic input and output capabilities, responsible for transmitting keyboard input and displaying character output. The iconic black-background blue-text terminal in the movie "The Matrix" is likely this type of 3270/5250 terminal. The connection between mainframes and remote terminals also used dedicated network lines and protocols, such as IBM's SNA network architecture.

The emergence and development of personal computers ignited the server era. In the 1980s, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said that everyone needs a computer on their desk. In the server era, personal computers themselves had processing capabilities and could complete a large amount of work such as word processing and local computing. Through TCP/IP networks cooperating with remote servers, various shared collaboration needs such as collaborative office and business processing could be achieved, gradually forming client/server and browser/server models based on open architecture and standardized protocols. The backend was the so-called IOE architecture (represented by IBM/Oracle/EMC companies' server, database, and storage architecture), with mainstream servers being minicomputers based on RISC chips; mainstream storage being SAN storage networks, disk arrays, tape libraries, optical disc libraries, and other equipment; mainstream networks being Ethernet LANs plus DDN/FR WAN interconnection, with mainstream adoption of relational databases like Oracle and DB2. With the rise of smartphones, smart devices gradually replaced personal computers as clients, stimulating richer application scenarios through mobilization.

In 2008, Google CEO Schmidt said that Watson was right, the world indeed only needs 5 computers, but these 5 are not mainframes, but 5 clouds. In the cloud computing era, the backend architecture abandoned the complex, heterogeneous IOE architecture, forming large-scale, standardized computing resource pools based on PC servers, local storage, and large Layer 2 networks. Relying on software-defined (SDN/SDDC, etc.), virtualization, and distributed technologies, it achieved flexible allocation and management of resources, providing users with IAAS and PAAS resources such as virtual machines, network drives, databases, and distributed software in the form of services, as well as high-end features like high availability, scalability, and disaster recovery. Users can quickly activate services and pay on demand.

As Schmidt meant, AWS and Alibaba's clouds correspond to IBM and Wang's mainframes, or HP's servers and Oracle's databases. IT application system builders faced minicomputers and database software in the server era, and face IAAS and PAAS services in the cloud computing era. Under the cloud computing and big data technology architecture characterized by virtualization and distribution, cloud-native applications characterized by stateless services and distributed computing are gradually penetrating from internet innovation industries to traditional industries. Traditional applications already existing in traditional industries will inevitably shrink from the center of the historical stage to a corner. For IT application system owners, users, builders, and maintainers, the methods of software development, system deployment, and operation and maintenance in the cloud computing era have all undergone fundamental changes. Therefore, we say that cloud computing's qualification as the third wave of IT development has basically been confirmed.

If we take the opening of the first municipal telephone exchange in Connecticut, USA in 1878 as the starting point of communication technology (CT), the CT industry is already 140 years old, with a longer history than IT. Telephone exchanges have gone through manual switching (1878), step-by-step (1893), crossbar (1938), stored program control (1965) and other forms. In the past 30 years, they have developed from fixed-line to mobile, from voice-centric to data-centric, gradually approaching and integrating with IT technology. According to the fifth-generation mobile communication network (5G) related specifications, the communication network can be completely viewed as a series of software applications deployed on a general cloud computing platform. These software implement traditional telecommunications services such as call connection and SMS forwarding. It can be said that IT technology has gone through 70 years and CT technology has experienced 140 years of evolution and development, finally achieving ICT integration in the cloud computing era of the third wave. From this perspective, cloud computing can be regarded as the third wave of ICT technology development.

2. Traps and Opportunities in the ICT Industry

In the 40 years since reform and opening up, the IT industry and CT equipment manufacturing industry have fortunately become fully competitive industries. Standing from the historical height of the third wave of ICT to examine China's ICT industry, China has already stood at the world forefront in many aspects of global competition. Huawei, Inspur, and Lenovo's equipment, Alibaba and Tencent's public clouds, undoubtedly all belong to the first tier globally. The shortcomings in core software and hardware technologies such as chips, operating systems, and databases are also expected to overtake on curves with the rise of China's ICT giants, taking advantage of the timing of open source and cloud computing reshuffling to get rid of foreign technology constraints more and faster, contributing to the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation pointed out by Xi Jinping in the report of the 19th National Congress.

For most ICT industry units and practitioners, the main battlefield in the server era was not developing, designing, and manufacturing computer equipment and database software, but using these software and hardware to develop and build various application systems or general tools; correspondingly, the main battlefield in the cloud computing era will definitely not be designing, building, and operating clouds, but using various services provided by clouds to develop and build various application systems or general tools. The approach of using KVM, DOCKER, and modifying open source software like OpenStack and kubernetes to help customers build private clouds, lacking the support of scale benefits and the drive of customer competition like public clouds, is difficult to build cost-effective cloud platforms and services. The fact that several IT software companies of listed company scale made high-profile entries into the private cloud construction field a few years ago and then low-key withdrew from that field also confirms the above view.

Currently, public cloud vendors such as AWS, Microsoft, Alibaba, and Tencent, with their service product forms gradually formed and continuously optimized in market competition, represent the leading productive forces of the cloud computing era. The private clouds and industry clouds of major enterprises and industries have significant gaps in equipment scale, technical optimization, service encapsulation, and ease of use. From the perspective of future development, these private clouds and industry clouds can only possibly exist long-term by continuously merging to expand scale and continuously absorbing advanced technology and experience from public clouds.

Because "cloud computing is the third wave of ICT development" has not yet become a widespread consensus, numerous ICT industry units and practitioners have not yet realized that their main battlefield is "using clouds" rather than "building clouds." Many IT application-intensive traditional large customers, following the traditional thinking inertia of the server era, are building many small clouds themselves; many IT companies and even startup teams are throwing themselves into the great cause of "building clouds" one after another, hoping to build usable and good clouds with their own intelligence and hard work.

The author believes that this is actually an unavoidable trap in the development of cloud computing technology, hoping that these units and practitioners can jump out of inertial thinking and assess for themselves whether they have the timing, scale, and strength to establish and operate one of "the five clouds the world needs" as Schmidt said; hoping that these IT companies and practitioners can learn IAAS and PAAS services provided by AWS and Alibaba just as they learned networks, storage, minicomputers, and databases in the server era, combining their own understanding and advantages of industries, businesses, and customers, flexibly using these services to build stable, reliable, secure, fault-tolerant, scalable, and low-cost cloud application systems, and extracting product service features representing advanced productive forces from the public cloud ecosystem into private clouds and industry clouds, truly contributing to informatization construction in various industries and contributing to China's economic development and national rejuvenation.