What is this thing called "cloud computing"? It's nothing new - that much is certain. Software vendors have been offering applications "hosted" off-site for years. The idea of computer services as a kind of managed utility dates back to the 1960s at least. Salesforce.com, founded in 1999, based its entire business model on the cloud, even if it didn't use the word at the time. Since then, we've seen a variety of takes on what came to be known as Software as a Service, or SaaS. That's now been supplanted by "the cloud," a term which refers to any number of apps that reside in huge banks of servers located far from the client.

As Congress lurches toward yet another stopgap solution to the nation's transportation infrastructure crisis, it might be valuable to take a fresh look at some of the assumptions that are driving the issue.

One night last January, Mark Shields was home in his kitchen making hummus, listening to This American Life, WBEZ's popular syndicated radio show. He was streaming the podcast on his Mac laptop via Apple's AirPort technology, which turned out to be an appropriate platform for listening to the episode, given that the subject was Apple itself.

The year 2014 will see the debut of the Triple E, first of a series of at least 20 containerships to be operated by Denmark's Maersk Line, each with a capacity of 18,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs). Few could have imagined this behemoth at the dawn of containerization in the mid-1950s. (Malcom McLean's Ideal X carried only 58 boxes.) In the ensuing decades, containerships grew steadily in size, as operators sought to squeeze the most out of their investments. When ships became too wide to fit through the Panama Canal, builders doubled down. Between 2008 and 2015, average ship size will have risen from 6,000 TEUs to more than 11,000 TEUs, according to Lars Jensen, chief executive officer and partner with SeaIntel Maritime Analysis. Maersk's Triple Es will dwarf them all.

Back in the early 1980s, when I was new to the world of transportation, logistics and the supply chain, I recall ocean carriers complaining that their freight rates weren't high enough to meet operating costs, let alone generate a profit. They were begging shippers to accept higher rates, in exchange for greater service reliability. Yet every time they would achieve some traction on the rate front, they would flood the market with new capacity, and offer deep discounts in order to fill the new ships. Then they would appeal to shippers for higher rates ...