Are You Ready for the Cloud?

If you listen to the pundits of social media and other new frontiers, and especially if you listen to Google, the future is the Internet.  The future is Cloud Computing.  This isn’t a new idea, of course, but just the latest iteration on one branch of computer advancement.  In the beginning, computers were expensive, and big.  Because of that, there developed two schools of thought:

1. Work on making computers cheaper and smaller so everyone could have them.
2. Leave the real computer giant and expensive, but find a way for people to cheaply access them.

Out of the first branch, you got the home PC.  Out of the second branch, you got the mainframe and the terminal.  Lots of people like to think of mainframes as being a dead technology, because since everyone can have a PC on their desktop, who needs a giant computer that does everything?  Well, lots of companies still do.  Even with advanced in chip technologies, there are still some very large mainframes being sold, and people still connect to them with terminals, or at least terminal emulation on a PC or a thin client.  I worked for a number of years at Norfolk Southern, and putting PCs in a train yard out in the middle of nowhere was just begging for vandalization and theft… but, put a cheap thin client terminal that does nothing but connect to the network and the mainframe, theft goes way down.  Until I got into programming, I made a pretty good career out of working with 3270 and 5250 and all the things that went with it.

But Cloud Computing takes things a step beyond the old terminal/server paradigm.  It abstracts, and it makes the terminal more generic while connecting to many servers.  Think: web browsing.  If you are reading this, then your terminal (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc) is connecting to my server.  Later, you might connect to Facebook’s server, or CNN’s, or any number of other servers out there.  The one thing that Cloud Computing wants to retain though, is the idea that nothing is stored on the terminal.  Google is a strong proponent of this.  With Gmail, and Bookmarks, and Docs, and Calendar, and many of their other products, they want to take all your files and all your work off your PC and put it on the web, where you can get at it with any terminal.  In fact, Google is going so far as to throw their hat into the ring, not just with their Chrome browser they put into beta last year, but with a full blown Operating System intended to be the window you see the Internet through.  Some people, after seeing the announcement of the Google OS, jumped right into the “Game On Microsoft” mindset, like Google was planning on trying to take down the big cheese.  But John Gruber wrote an excellent write up of putting the Google OS into context.  The fact is, all Google wants is to make a netbook style PC that boots quickly, connects (wirelessly) to the Internet, and gets you all of your apps and documents in the Cloud.

Personally, I’m fully behind the idea.  I have a laptop that I hate using.  The reason is because its battery lasts about 2 hours, however, every time I turn it on that’s easily 5 minutes, and it takes around 2 minutes to get out of hibernation (longer if I put it to sleep with a few applications open).  Its bulky, its hot, and if I’m away from a power source, I really only end up getting about an hour or so out of the battery if I’m using it in short spurts.  That kind of performance is why devices like the iPhone and blackberries have become popular, much longer battery life to be able to jot down notes or check emails on the go.  The only reason I have not yet gone down the mobile device route is that when I write I still prefer a full keyboard (or at least a compact keyboard like the ones you find on a notebook or netbook).  So a netbook that boots faster, runs cooler and utilizes the battery well is exactly what I am looking for.

But, as the title questions, am I ready to ditch my desktop for a workspace in the clouds?  I stopped saving bookmarks to my browser years ago, mostly because it was annoying to have a bookmark in IE but not Firefox, or at home but not at work, and most programs to sync them up were annoying to use.  I still use Outlook for email, but I’m just about ready to plunge into Gmail, especially since my webhost offers a deal where I can have all my domain email addresses be handled by Gmail.  Plus, it finally came out of Beta recently. (snicker)  I do use Google Docs for a few things, but I’m not totally sold on putting all my files out there, especially the ones I want to be sure that no one sees (get your mind out of the gutter, I mean design docs and other things I’m writing).  Recently, I’ve stopped playing most PC games in favor of web based titles, and with the exception of Free Realms and Battlefield Heroes, they’ll all run in any compliant browser.  Even so, I think I’d be perfectly happy having a desktop sit in the corner just for games while having a netbook for all my other tasks.

I might not be ready to sail among the clouds just yet, but I think I’ll get there soon enough… how about you?