Cloud Computing – Fact and Fantasy
By David Friend - Chairman & CEO Carbonite, Inc
It’s been ten years since the last Internet bubble, so I guess it’s about time for another orgy of earth – shaking industry hype. The words “cloud computing” were referred to in an email I got recently from Motley Fool as “The two words Bill Gates doesn’t want you to hear…” PC Magaine asked rhetorically, “Is cloud computing the next big thing?” Business Week ran an article called “Computing Heads for the Clouds.” And Forbes ran a piece that predicted “The Death of Hardware.” The International Herald Tribune ran a piece on Google’s new data center in Oregon, describing it ominously as “looming like an information-age nuclear plant.” Nicholas Carr, writing in the Harvard Business Review, goes on to say “Rendered obsolete, the traditional PC is replaced by a simple terminal — a “thin client” that’s little more than a monitor hooked up to the Internet.”
I’m the CEO of a company whose product is frequently cited as the poster child for cloud computing, or more specifically “software as a service” (SaaS). Carbonite, as a leading provider of automated online backup for consumers and small businesses, keeps everything in the cloud. So I believe in cloud computing. But when I see investment advisory newsletters telling me, “But in order to claim your fair share of the wealth, you have to know who the dominant players are – and you have to get invested now,” I wonder what they’ve been inhaling.
The Internet really was a revolution. Before I had a DSL connection, I had no Internet. After I got DSL I had Internet. Is was a binary before/after proposition. A thin client computer is still a computer. It is not a monitor, as in the old green screen variety. It still has to have all the computing horsepower needed for graphics rendering, and more. Maybe it doesn’t need a hard drive because storage can be done on the network. But it’s definitely not some great revolutionary breakthrough. Nor is doing what Google’s doing with their giant data centers – searching through billions of documents in a flash – much more than an evolutionary step from shared database applications that have been running on mainframes, and then servers, for decades. It’s not the cloud computing that’s bringing in the money, it’s the advertising, of course. Now with so many people connected to the Internet, companies like Google find ways to provide useful services, such as general information searches, that bring eyeballs to the screens of millions of PCs. And you know the rest.
What is new, but not all that revolutionary in my opinion, is doing more of the computing on the server and less on the PC. But again, this is not revolutionary, but rather evolutionary. If you wanted to do word processing, you used to go to a retail store and buy a CD with Microsoft Word on it, for instance. Then, with the Internet, you could download the whole thing and install it. Now with Google Apps, you can actually do your word processing online without downloading software. Or that’s how it appears. Of course, the software is for the most part still running on your PC. When you insert or delete a word, or move the cursor around through your document, that computing is still done locally. It’s not at all like the old Wang word processors of the past that really did use dumb terminals and all the computing was on the server. What Google is really doing is lending you the software on a temporary basis, and doing storage and a few other background tasks in the cloud. Mostly what they want to do is make word processing cheap so that you have to repeatedly go to their web site to get it. Just another eyeball magnet. The whole web is really about applications that partly run on your PC and partly on the servers.
So I can see a day when you no longer buy and install applications on your PC. You will simply borrow them (and cache them, probably) as you need them. Today, my PC looks different from yours – it’s personalized with all the applications that I’ve purchased. Tomorrow, it’s like that my PC will be exactly the same as yours – all you would see is some kind of browser. I could log in on your PC and the screen would look exactly the same as it does on my PC – same word processor, same graphics programs, same set of files. Then the PC just becomes like a generic device, just like a cell phone. Stick your SIM card in someone else’s phone, and presto, it looks like your phone. Except you don’t have to have the physical SIM card.
Boxes software sales are already in the tank – retail stores are cutting back or eliminating their software shelves. With time, even downloaded software sales will start to decline as people move more to the “rental” model. But software is not going away for a long time – right now I’m sitting on a train. It will be a long time before they have high speed Internet on this train. I know it’s possible, but this is the USA where our public transportation infrastructure isn’t exactly the highest priority. Until that day comes, I need software and I need my hard drive. And when I get home and finally do connect to the Internet, I’ll be glad to have all my work automatically backed up in the cloud.
More information on Carbonite can be found at www.carbonite.com.au
