The funny thing about gravity

We've seen a lot of talk about Data Gravity recently. Essentially the idea is that data has inertia, i.e., once your repository gets big enough its very hard to move. I buy the concept wholeheartedly. It makes a lot of sense. This obviously puts the owners of the repositories (think Amazon's S3) in a great position. They could start charging usurious rents, or more likely, they will end up sucking all of the applications and developers onto their platform. The seemingly obvious conclusion then for any big-data start up is that you must hold the data. You must start accumulating mass. You must require your customers to import their data into your service in order to use it. That way, they're trapped and you've gained mass and inertia. And this seems key to the business model of many new big data startups.

Of course, this neglects the fact that data has mass NOW, not just in the future. Big corporations have lots of data, they cannot move it to your service. You'll have to move your service to their data.

Well, maybe big corporations aren't your customer base. Then you're only competing with Amazon and the other providers who already have a lot of mass. I, for one, am turned off by services that won't let me store my data in S3. You see, I can't have a copy of my data for every application vendor / service provider. So I need you to use my data in some central place where you can all get at it.

The accretion of mass has this positive feedback to it. Once there are a few massive entities, they will accumulate essentially all of the mass. What are the odds that a new planet will form in the asteroid belt? Zero. So the question is how many planets are there going to be in this big data universe and how many tiny little asteroids?

Of course, I'm biased because Numatix (www.numatix.org) is designed to run anywhere.