During my visit to General Electric’s Global Research Centers in San Ramon, California, and Niskayuna, New York, last month, I got what amounts to an end-to-end tour of what GE calls the “Industrial Internet.” The phrase refers to the technologies of cloud computing and the “Internet of Things” applied across a broad swath of GE’s businesses in an effort to squeeze better performance and efficiency from the operations of everything from computer-controlled manufacturing equipment to gas turbine engines and power plants. It’s an ambitious effort that GE is hoping to eventually sell to other companies as a cloud service—branded as Predix.