Megatrend 2008 — Send in the Clouds
by Joe McKendrick
Is 2008 the year we move into the compute cloud? Are we already mostly in the cloud?
From Nick Carr’s recent interview in Wired Magazine:
“Wired: When does the big switch from the desktop to the data cloud happen?
Carr: Most people are already there. Young people in particular spend way more time using so-called cloud apps - MySpace, Flickr, Gmail - than running old-fashioned programs on their hard drives. What’s amazing is that this shift from private to public software has happened without us even noticing it …”
‘Private’ versus ‘public’ software — that’s a really good way to describe the differences between Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 applications versus traditional applications.
On Microsoft’s response to cloud computing:
ZDNet’s David Berlind spoke with Microsoft product manager Kirk Gregersen, who said that Microsoft’s release of Office Live Workspace “really just views OLW as a collaborative infrastructure that’s designed to give users a better way to collaborate on documents than many do now with e-mail and/or USB keys.”
But as David puts it: “Much the same way Google is barely willing to admit that Google Apps is designed to compete with Microsoft Office, Microsoft seems barely willing to admit that Office Live Workspace is a response to the pressure that its Web competitors are bringing to bear.”
Google, Webex, and Zoho have to have Microsoft sweating a bit. We’re talking about a huge paradigm change happening right before our eyes, from private to public software. This means on-site bloatware may be slowly working its way to the ash heap of history.
