ingenious code ::

I just finished reading an article in this week Economist about the new craze in IT, Cloud Computing. This week Microsoft released a CTP version on Windows azure, a cloud based operating system. I first heard about the concept of cloud computing back in June when I was invited to a Microsoft focus group. At first, I was a little sceptic regarding the concept but now I could see that this is part of the natural evolution of the computer and the interaction between humans and computers.

When I started to play with computers (literally, play with computers) back in 1988, the computer had the shape of a box. Actually two boxes, one a 14" CRT Monitor and the Computer itself. Most of us some of us still use the desktop computer, but the trend today is that computers are becoming smaller and smaller and more distributed. It's seems that everyone today has a laptop either a MAC or a PC, and in many cases you will find that a family household holds between 2-3 computers. 

So how does cloud computing comes into play? very simple. Every one today uses somekind of cloud computing service like gmail, flickr, facebook. We use it to store picture, information, movies etc. With the Web 2.0 revolution a lot of software that we used on our computer we could now use a web application. If its office, google has a pretty good alternative. For personal finance you could use mint.com and the list could go on and on. 

I think the next step in this evolution is pretty obvious. The next generation computer will have a touchscreen, and a wireless network card. The operating system will be very small and compact and will just need to do one thing, connect you to the Internet. Once you got the connection, what else do you need?

Of course this next step has its disadvantages like privacy and security. Think about it, the simple notion is that the services that we use online are hosted on servers owned by corporations. So if you think about it, whatever you put online is out there and you don't always know who could be sniffing around.

In sum, like it or not cloud computing is here and its here to stay. Due to the relative low costs of servers and equipment companies like Microsoft and google are spending millions of dollars on building this cloud environment and the consumers are flocking to use these type of services. And I think that if you at it at the 50,000 feet level this all makes sense.

• Wikipedia-Cloud Computing 
• YouTube - What is cloud computing 
• 15 Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing  
• What is windows Azure?