Category Archives: ‘Cloud’ computing

The Web vs the Cloud

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Interesting thought.

The Web was perfectly named. Every point connecting to other points, not always directly, but your requests and data would get there. And even if part of the web were to be destroyed or taken down in some way, then the remainder would exist. Cloud Computing will retain this aspect of the web design as its backbone form of communication. However, the Cloud Computing concept is also perfectly named.

Whereas with the Web we could, from any point on the web, see pretty much everything else, with the Cloud we will not be able to know what’s taking place in the system, just as we cannot see today what exists inside of clouds. They are murky, dense objects that reveal almost no depth at all. In fact, if you’ve ever seen airplanes fly in and out of clouds, you know that once they are a few feet on the inside they’re completely obscured. And it’s the same with Cloud Computing.

We will have access points to access these future Cloud Computing systems, the ones which from all outward appearances will seem like a regular website. However, the evolution of computing power over time has mandated (from a business perspective) that the available data be mined for usable information which can then, in some way, relate to profit — either through better services offered to users, or for marketing and sales revenues through more directly targeted campaigns.

While everything on the outside appears to be as it was before, what’s happening on the inside of the new cloud-computing systems will be completely different. And I have, as of yet, to see a comprehensive analysis of how our privacy, our data security and our online lives will be affected by such a system.

To me, Cloud Computing models offer the greatest possibility for data control–and the abuse of that control–that I’ve ever seen.

Rash predictions and cloud computing

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This morning’s Observer column.

So what about [Tom] Watson’s prediction of the world market for [five] computers? Once again, there’s no convincing evidence he ever said it. According to Wikipedia, the earliest known citation is in the email signature of a Usenet member in 1986, which simply says “remark attributed to Thomas J Watson (chairman of the board of International Business Machines), 1943” – not exactly an impeccable source.

Nevertheless, Watson was on many people’s minds this week, after a talk given in San Francisco by Rick Rashid, the computer scientist who now heads Microsoft’s formidable research division. According to the Financial Times reporter who broke the story, Rashid said that “around 20 per cent of all the servers sold around the world each year are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies – he named Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon”.

If true, that’s an amazing statistic, and one that suggests we are well on the way to the kind of world supposedly envisaged by Watson.

Cloud computing’s silver lining

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This morning’s Observer column.

Here’s an ugly word that has infiltrated itself into everyday discourse: “outage”. Its etymology is a bit opaque, but it’s clearly modelled on ‘shortage’. Until last year it meant “a temporary suspension of operation, especially of electrical power supply”. Now it means a temporary suspension of ‘cloud computing’ services – ie services, such as email, web-hosting and file storage, provided remotely via the internet.

Until last week, most Europeans were probably blissfully unaware of the term. But then Gmail – Google’s webmail service – went down on Tuesday…

Offline Gmail

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Google’s begun to roll out an experimental feature in Gmail Labs — offline Gmail. Here’s how the Google Blog describes it.

Once you turn on this feature, Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you’re connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail’s servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer’s hard drive instead of the information sent across the network. You can read messages, star and label them, and do all of the things you’re used to doing while reading your webmail online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection. And if you’re on an unreliable or slow connection (like when you’re ‘borrowing’ your neighbor’s wireless), you can choose to use ‘flaky connection mode’, which is somewhere in between: it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background. Our goal is to provide nearly the same browser-based Gmail experience whether you’re using the data cached on your computer or talking directly to the server.

Hmmm… Wonder how big the cache would have to be for my gmail box.

A cloudy future?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Google Trends reveals that ‘cloud computing’ first starts to figure in queries in 2007. Interest grew slowly until April this year, when Salesforce.com announced a deal with Google. There’s another peak in July, when Yahoo, Intel and HP announced they were collaborating with several universities to set up cloud computing labs. This week’s news from Amazon will doubtless produce an even bigger spike in Google searches by people wondering what’s going on.

If you believe the enthusiasts, it’s nothing less than our old friend, the paradigm shift…

The aphrodisiac effect of power

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This morning’s Observer column…

Once upon a time, the ultimate put-down to a bright spark was to say, ‘well, if you’re so smart, how come you’re not so rich?’. Wall Street Crash 2.0 has rather undermined this ploy, by making it clear that an awful lot of very rich folks were anything but smart. It turns out that we were unduly dazzled by the Masters of the Universe, but we had to wait until they had vaporised the US economy before getting wise to the fact.

Actually, this was just a special case of a more general human weakness – our tendency to lose all capacity for critical thought when confronted by great wealth or power. This ‘aphrodisiac effect’ seems to be ubiquitous. One saw it, for example, in the way leggy females used to throw themselves at Henry Kissinger, a stumpy troglodyte who just happened to be US Secretary of State. And we see it in the way even hardened hacks go weak when offered an audience with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or even, God help us, Steve Ballmer, chief of Microsoft…

Stallman: Cloud computing is a trap

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Bobbie Johnson has an interesting piece based on an interview with Richard Stallman who, as usual, is in contrarian mood.

The concept of using web-based programs like Google’s Gmail is “worse than stupidity”, according to a leading advocate of free software.

Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained currency in recent years. Large internet and technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon are pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over the net.

But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he told The Guardian.

“Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”

The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party…

Ten years on

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This morning’s Observer column…

In the old days, dates fell into one of two categories: BC and AD. Now the relevant categories are BG. and AG: Before and After Google. The critical date was 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched their PageRank system for rating web pages. It was an epochal moment. No British child knows there was once a world without Google. In fact most would be astonished that people were able to get along without it.

Google is 10 years old today and it has celebrated by upsetting the world’s applecart – again…

Google pokes a sharp stick in Microsoft’s eye

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You may have seen the news that Google is launching its own (open source) browser, codenamed Chrome. According to the company blog,

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

In reality, this takes us back to the original threat/promise of Netscape — the thing that threatened Microsoft so much that it set out to destroy Netscape. This was the idea that the browser was destined to become the key piece of software — almost an operating system in its own right.

Google Chrome takes up that idea, and holds out the promise of making it a reality. As Nick Carr puts it, Chrome

promises a similar leap in the capacity of the cloud to run applications speedily, securely, and simultaneously. Indeed, it is the first browser built from the ground up with the idea of running applications rather than displaying pages. It takes the browser’s file-tab metaphor, a metaphor reflecting the old idea of the web as a collection of pages, and repurposes it for application multitasking. Chrome is the first cloud browser.

See the exposition in Google’s Comic Book for an outline of the thinking that went into Chrome. It’s basically the first multi-threaded browser.

This is an important strategic move by Google. To quote Carr again,

Google is motivated by something much larger than its congenital hatred of Microsoft. It knows that its future, both as a business and as an idea (and Google’s always been both), hinges on the continued rapid expansion of the usefulness of the Internet, which in turn hinges on the continued rapid expansion of the capabilities of web apps, which in turn hinges on rapid improvements in the workings of web browsers.

To Google, the browser has become a weak link in the cloud system – the needle’s eye through which the outputs of the company’s massive data centers usually have to pass to reach the user – and as a result the browser has to be rethought, revamped, retooled, modernized…

I’ve no doubt that this development will be presented in the mainstream media as Google’s “attempt to capture the browser market”. That would be a misconception IMHO. By making Chrome open source Google is ensuring that any browser that seeks to stay competitive has to take up the multi-threading idea. Which will make cloud computing even more pervasive. Which will further increase Google’s importance. As a strategy, it’s fiendishly clever.

And just in case the folks in Cupertino are sniggering, this is a harbinger of things to come on the mobile phone front too. Google has sussed that the (closed) iPhone will be difficult to beat, so its attack is based on an open platform (Android). Smart.

Many thanks to Gerard for the original link (even though he hates the Comic Book!)

LATER: I can’t run Chrome because the first beta release only runs under Windows Vista (if you please), but TechCrunch has been using it and likes it a lot.

STILL LATER: Kate Greene has a useful overview in Tech Review. And the Register published a perceptive piece by Tim Anderson.