Posted by Joe Diamond on Tue, Jul 14, 2009 @ 07:00 PM
The days of
Doogie Howser's blue
IBM PS/2 screen with the ever-so-subtle blinking cursor are long gone. Today, we've got desktop computers with multi-core processors, several gigabytes of RAM, hard drives in excess of a terabyte and fiber optic connections in our homes that can symmetrically transfer data at more than 15 megabits per second. And, how we're using these technologies and huge Internet pipelines would blow even Mr. Howser's genius mind.
Then, Doogie was rockin' an 8 MHz processor; today we're conceptualizing entire operating systems in the cloud. With Google's Chrome OS announcement, the "cloud computing" phrase is going to buzz even more. I get it - Google's omnipresent, but short of a locally-installed application here and there, that presence has almost always been strictly in the cloud. We all expected that Google's next big project would be a cloud-based operating system - it was simply the next logical step.
Creating even more cloud buzz, Microsoft recently announced that they will release a free, cloud-based version of their Office software. Up until now, Microsoft has been best known for their on-premise solutions. However, this announcement makes it clear that Microsoft has officially recognized the cloud as a viable vehicle for application delivery. But most importantly, this is the confirmation evangelists like us have known would one day come - the cloud is going mainstream.
The question is no longer whether or not cloud computing is here to stay; it's only a question as to which giant is going to win the race. So, who is it going to be? Google or Microsoft?
Posted by Nick Mehta on Thu, Sep 04, 2008 @ 02:14 AM
Kudos to Google for their innovation with
Google Chrome, their new web browser that was just introduced in BETA.
Beyond having one of the most creative marketing campaigns I've seen in a while, Google introduced a great offering that should help individuals, businesses and companies trying to deliver software-as-a-service (SaaS). As the browser gets better, SaaS gets better too. And I'm personally excited to get rid of these annoying Firefox browser crashes when I have 25 tabs open. :)