“In his new book “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google,” computer industry writer and former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review Nicholas G. Carr discusses the changes he sees in the future of computing. One of the more dramatic changes is a shift to cloud computing — where applications and files are stored on a large, centralized supercomputer or network. The end user accesses his or her files using computers that are more streamlined but less sophisticated than today’s typical machines,” Chris Pollette writes for Howstuffworks.
“On October 17, 2007, Carr took the idea a step further in a posting on his Rough Type blog. He called out two hot technology companies, Google and Apple, and said they were on the verge of a partnership in which Apple would make an inexpensive piece of hardware users could carry around. This would leverage the computing power of the vast data centers Google has been building to hold the applications and the data for millions of users,” Pollette writes.
Pollette asks, “Could a Google/Apple team make cloud computing a widespread phenomenon? And if they move forward, what’s in it for Google and Apple? The biggest question of all: If they build the cloud computer, will anyone use it?”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Buffalo2001” for the heads up.]
If Apple and Google do join together to form ‘Cloud’, how long before Micro$ost and Yahoo! copy them and bring us the ‘El Niño’ network?
El Niño – your data, our disaster™
What happens when the cloud is not available. We get a nice shinny brick? Rather than “cloud computing” which sounds retarded and in practice will never really work. At least not in the foreseeable future. How about we talk about a data cloud, if we must use the word cloud. I think striving for a data “cloud” where the edges touch your devices would be a much more attainable goal. Data can be cached, processor cycles cannot.
Umm, People aren’t realizing that it’s ALREADY here. Small steps of course.. The iPhone.. People use small things, like google maps.. Their iPhone is the less sophistacated computer (than a desktop) and the program (maps, etc) are running on google’s computers.. We accept this already, and people are demanding more. Eventually, we’ll think nothing of editing our photos on the go, on our iPhone, which is being manipulated by the servers and merely displayed on the phone.. Google Docs anyone?
ok, ok, but does it blend?
But more importantly, Bob, does it make Julean Fries?
@Drell,
My thoughts exactly!
@djp
Nope, but it might make Julienne fries.
If you build it they will come.
: )
examples already exist:
Zamzar converts images.
http://www.zamzar.com/conversionTypes.php
Vector Magic vectorizes bitmap images.
http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/
Others are trying to be a photoshop replacement.
@Ampar–
“Rein on your poor raid…”
Nice. 😀
i am ready and waiting for the google apple cloud.
…just give me a 6 inch multitouch larger iPod with a real CPU and let me store everything i can on their machines. i am ready!
what is in it for them?
when google has ALL you data and sends you ads that pay, and Apple sells a computer in a handheld for good money, they both profit. Steve has got millions of people carrying around the next generation smart device/PDA/internet device. all he has to do is keep letting them think it is a phone or ipod.
>>. One of the more dramatic changes is a shift to cloud computing — where applications and files are stored on a large, centralized supercomputer or network.
Who would want to pay for the bandwidth though? Also, Even if one could access the internet anywhere in the world, Cloud computing would require that the internet become waaay faster than it is now. People wouldn’t want to wait for their applications to load. Also, I’m guessing cloud computing would require people to store their data online.
Online email and banking applications have become popular because they are convenient and secure. It wouldn’t be convenient to have to download your own data just to view it when the file sizes involved are over 8 gb and bandwith is expensive. I have 500 gb of multimedia files I keep on my hdd (both for my work and my own viewing pleasure). A couple of years ago people where saying no one would ever need a hard drive with a larger capacity than 4gb. Digital distribution is the way of the future, and physical media is dead. In a decade it is not so unreasonable to assume that the average person will have a digital multimedia library in the TB range with high definition video becoming mainstream. So unless I can view/download gigabytes of data instantly, no deal.
Also, high volume digital storage options are plentiful and relatively cheap for the average consumer. You can buy a 500 gb or 1 TB external drive for under 400 USD. You can then proceed to hook up this external drive to your home network and be able to access it anywhere in the world with the right software. If you don’t have a lot of files, you can just get a 32 gb usb key and carry that around with you on your keychain or backup your data to your ipod and use it as an external drive.
Finally, the biggest problem with this scheme is that no one would be able to own their software. Instead of buying software you would have to continually pay to use it, and you wouldn’t be able to control how you use it.
The only advantage I see in this is that you wouldn’t lose any of your files or applications if your house burned down.
So maybe we’ll start seeing services that allow us to encrypt and backup hundred of gbs of data for safe keeping, but we’ll never see online applications replace local applications and storage completely.
Anyway, If our worst fears do come true and corporations do start moving their applications online, there will always be free alternatives out there.
Hmmmm….. iPhone/iPod Touch (on the small side) and Macbook Air…. If a cloud computing paradigm were to arise, it wouldn’t even need new hardware. These two (three) products are already being sold….
Why not? It’s no different than iDisk right now. You have your local files and specify some to be backed up to the Cloud. This allows you to have off-site storage, and allows you to access while away from your local computer. This also allows you to have multiple Apple-made devices, like your iPhone or Touch to access the info you’ve stored in the Cloud.
I think Cringely originally wrote about this, two years ago, that Google would create the “black box” device that would replace your STB, and that Google’s mobile datacenters would make HD filesharing/streaming possible. I think later, the idea became Google stores, while Apple builds the devices. It makes lots of sense to me.
There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to the widespread adopttion of “cloud computing.” One thing I know for sure: the average home user is profoundly ignorant of technical matters. Most of my clients are vaguely aware that their files live on a hard drive inside the computer. They also know the term “memory,” but usually mistake it for storage capacity. Most of them have no idea where their email actually lives and, more importantly, don’t really care. They expect their computers to “just work” like magic, and call a Mac consultant like me on the relatively rare occasion when they don’t. I would expect computer users like these to be very good candidates for the switch to cloud computing (if it ever happens).
They don’t back up; they don’t know where their files live; they don’t know a blessed thing about the proper care of their computers. Users like these would, in many ways, be much better off if their applications, and their data, lived on servers that are professionally backed up and maintained.
The big downside of cloud computing, it is often said, is that your computer is useless if your internet connection goes down. But what I observe is that the average home user already relies on the internet for most of the activities they routinely engage in— like web browsing, email, blogging and photo sharing. Add social networking and YouTube to the list and it starts to become clear just how important the internet already is to home users (as well as everyone else).
It’s true that hard drives are dirt cheap and getting cheaper, but only enthusiasts and pros actually use them to organize and safeguard their data. Server storage is also dirt cheap, so cheap that Google is giving heaps of it away for free to anyone who signs up for GMail. But this brings us to the weakest link in the cloud computing chain: bandwidth, aka transfer speed, which today is still pitifully inadequate for copying large amounts of data in a timely fashion. Off the top of my head, I’d say that broadband speeds would need to increase at least tenfold before it would make sense to start talking about moving the contents of our hard drives to a bunch of servers in the sky. Chances are that the average reader of this forum would not be interested in making the switch anyway. But a whole lot of other people would.
The iPhone was originally a cloud computing device. Most of its applications were supposed to be accessible online and only online. People started hacking it to run local applications the instant it became available. Apple is releasing the official iPhone SDK this month. People like to able to own their programs and files. Cloud computing might yield some useful backup and streaming solutions, but that’s it.
People are always going to want more powerful and faster computers. No one is going to use an underpowered machine as their main computer, even if it is cheap, if they can help it. The hand held devices of the future that may replace laptops and desktop computers aren’t going to cloud computers. They’re going to be very powerful full featured miniature computers. Also Cloud computing would be limited by a bottleneck created by the speed of your internet connection.
Also this talk about the Macbook air being a cloud computer because it doesn’t have an optical drive is nonsense. The Air doesn’t have an Optical drive, because physical media (dvds etc) is on the way out, and more and more people are downloading multimedia content to their computers.
It is more probable that people will carry all their data on high speed TB size USB keys attached to their keychains in the future than cloud computing replacing everything.
@alansky:
Very good points you make, but I would disagree with you on the point that we “power” users here wouldn’t be interested in cloud computing. I for one try as much as possible (using .mac and my own servers at work) to reduce all simple (eg not big video or audio) files to a cloud computing paradigm already. It’s simply far easier to be able to access all my files from any of the dozen or so computers (and my iPhone) that I regularly use than to have to remember to send them to the right machine. The negative is relatively slow access to the files, but for smaller things it’s not that huge a deal.
Of course I can’t yet do this with applications themselves, but even there I access a license server at work to snag my Maya, Final Cut HD and other apps, so the licenses at least are living in the clouds right now
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Anyway, I must say as a power user, I’m even more for cloud computing than the average joe. Make it work well and I’m there!
To TheConfuzed1:
Actually, I had a hard time choosing among reign, rein and rain.
But thanks for getting it!
alansky said
“There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to the widespread adopttion of “cloud computing.” One thing I know for sure: the average home user is profoundly ignorant of technical matters. Most of my clients are vaguely aware that their files live on a hard drive inside the computer. They also know the term “memory,” but usually mistake it for storage capacity. Most of them have no idea where their email actually lives and, more importantly, don’t really care. They expect their computers to “just work” like magic, and call a Mac consultant like me on the relatively rare occasion when they don’t. I would expect computer users like these to be very good candidates for the switch to cloud computing (if it ever happens).”
This is only true for people born before the 1980s. The younger generation, is completely immersed in technology starting from their early teens. They are far more technically proficient. The people you describe will be the minority in less than a decade.
alansky said
“They don’t back up; they don’t know where their files live; they don’t know a blessed thing about the proper care of their computers. Users like these would, in many ways, be much better off if their applications, and their data, lived on servers that are professionally backed up and maintained.”
I’m thinking flash and holographic storage (devices that rarely or never fail and don’t have moving parts) will change this soon.
longonson said
“Vector Magic vectorizes bitmap images.
http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/“
Yes, I’m upset that I can’t download this application and use it offline and wish a downloadable version would be offered.
Online apps only make sense for stuff like streaming, email, and banking. NOT for stuff like this.
There is a bit of confusion here with respect to the concept of ‘cloud computing’. You don’t necessarily need to download the file to your local computer’s storage in order to work on it (or upload it to the ‘cloud’ once you’re done). If your user interface is the web browser (or embedded flash file), all of your work is actually done on the remote hardware, with only presentation being taken cared of by your local machine.
I have completely moved all my mundane word processing (as well as presentations, and a rare spreadsheet) to ThinkFree. The storage there is plentiful, the office applications work extremely well through the web interface, and you never need to download the files locally. Obviously, if you need to insert an image into your document, and the image is not on your ThinkFree storage, you’ll have to upload it. Other than that, though, everything else is done remotely.
Obvious benefits of an arrangement such as ThinkFree are safety of your work (no need to back up), and even more attractively, universal access from everywhere. I no longer have to wait until Monday to get to my office computer in order to get to some file; or sync between various computers to make sure they all have the most recent version.
There are definitely some promising features for the ‘cloud computing’ paradigm. As storage gets cheaper, bandwidth gets better, compression gets more efficient and processing power continues to increase, the converging paths will eventually intersect for the ‘cloud’ concept to be broadly useful solution.
By “cloud-computing”, we should all think multi-tenant architecture like many examples existing today:
http://www.netsuite.com
http://www.salesforce.com
Google Docs
Google Calendar
Gmail
The advantages of such systems are many, many fold:
– unapologetically platform agnostic (sorry Micro$0ft)
– no more downloading updates, everyone is working in the most current version.
– We don’t need to all have our own servers for email (sorry Exchange), servers for backups, servers for file storage, and we wouldn’t maintain them nearly as well as experts in the field in large server farms that will guarantee uptime and maintain redundant copies of your data in different locations (preventing lost data to natural disaster and so on).
This is about infrastructure and is as obvious as our power grid that lights up our computers, homes and businesses – we aren’t nearly as efficient if we all have to generate our own power.
You can rest assured that the data is secured. Thousands upon thousands of companies are running their entire businesses on this sort of infrastructure today with Netsuite and Salesforce.com.
This isn’t coming. This is here.
@Predrag
Certain apps moving online makes sense. But one day we’re going to able to carry around Terabytes in our pockets so I don’t think we’ll see people backup all their data online. Instead people will just carry all their files around with them wherever they go.
Huh….. didn’t we have this back in the 70’s? It was called “a dumb terminal attached to a main frame” back then but the idea is the same. So if this is such a good idea, why did Apple invent the personal computer.
Oh, and wouldn’t a system like this be very dependent on a good data link. I live in Maine where I have to drive around to the right hill top just to get enough signal to make a phone call. Forget about using the internet on my iPhone unless I happen across someone’s unprotected 802.11.
Wil dEye dBoyfr om Freecloud
Field techs (I used to work for, among other places, IBM) used to carry a device, lovingly called a “brick”, that was used to access “the central database”. All scheduling info, lots of technical info, tips-n-tricks, you name it, could be found there. These same techs now use Blackberries, I have one myself. As I write this, the B’berry net is down, but the internet seems to be working fine. We will never go “all in one”, redundant systems are too important in a technically dependent world. In point of fact, what I did at IBM was provide redundancy, in both my person and abilities.