And we shall all live on clouds...

The thing that struck me about Google’s announcement of its new-fangled web browser Chrome wasn’t the inward groan of “do we really need another browser?” No. It was a sneaky confirmation of the suspicion that one day, we will live on clouds. Cloud computing, that is.



If, like 90% of the world’s population, you’ve not really bothered to stay up to date with the latest in geekspeak, “Cloud computing” is the lovingly coined term that describes the storing of data, applications etc. on servers connected to the internet, as opposed to on your friendly hard disk (C: drive, for the uninitiated).

Basically, this covers storing your photos onto online services like Flickr, PhotoBucket or Share on Ovi, running Google Docs off the Google server via a JAVA shell, or even, just posting on your blog. Why Cloud? Because your data is not stored on you hard disk, but on the sprawling morass of the internet.

Innovative companies like Adobe and Microsoft have started jumping onto the bandwagon with platforms like Adobe Air and Silverlight that allow you to run web applications when not connected to the internet even. Google Gears also lets you run Google Docs offline.

But none of these platforms are as ubiquitous as your browser. Thus, I’m seeing Chrome as Google’s play to get its platform on the desktop / laptop PC /Mac. To simplify the thinking, as Cloud Computing takes root the web browser will become more and more important, and the actual Operating System becomes less and less important. Think about it; the FireFox Foundation doesn’t care whether you run Windows or Mac OS, so long as your browser is FireFox.

So if you get to a point where the first thing you do is log-on to your browser and surf the internet, would you really care to splash RM 580 for Windows XP when free Linux builds (like Ubuntu)will give us just as good an experience? What if Chrome launches as a shell on boot, cleverly disguising Mac OS, Windows XP or Ubuntu with a swish Google interface?

Of course, there are challenges roadblocking this dream and I just want to point two out:

Security and privacy:
With your home computer, it was your responsibility to ensure you have all the requisite firewalls, antivirus, antispam and what-nots installed to safeguard your data. When all that data goes to the cloud, I wonder what level of liability / responsibility on the providers (like Google) to ensure our (mostly private) data is safe and sound. Sure, they have privacy policies, but when your emails actually get stolen, what’s the recourse?

The other thing about putting all your stuff on the cloud is that like information then gets clumped together. Hackers who want to steal lots of private emails just have to target Gmail. Similarly, targeting Facebook will net you lots of private contact information.

Online all-the-time:
The second obvious challenge is that when more and more gets put on the cloud, the more you’ll need that internet connection everywhere. Obviously, there’s need to balance between what you put on the cloud and what you store locally, but being online and connected is intrinsic to cloud computing.

This challenge is actually an opportunity for mobile because cloud computing basically plays on the strengths of mobile and covers its weaknesses. With mobile technology on the up and up (WiMAX, 3.5G), full internet web-browsing on your mobile etc.), what you can’t store on your mobile you can easily pull off the ‘cloud’.

There’s an awful lot of potential in the clouds.