"In Europe and the United States, the possibility of starting
new, or of renewing the licenses of existing, nuclear reactors
evaporated. The power of the Green Party in many EU countries
surged, and in the United States, the specter of an "oil shock"
that would tip the nation back into recession led to a once in a
lifetime bipartisan commitment to accelerate the development of
renewable energy and the reduction of energy consumption.
"Concurrently, a new business model called "cloud computing" was
coming into its own, and millions of new servers were brought on
line as a growing flood of public and private sector entities moved
their software and data to third-party hosts that maintained them
for a fee. Predictably, the IT industry rapidly consolidated as
data hosting became commoditized and profit margins narrowed. After
ten years, a handful of companies was hosting the data and software
of most private and public enterprises."
