Chrome is a key piece in the puzzle behind the Google Cloud -- a pervasive distributed computing infrastructure that will render the present day PC and OS architecture obsolete. Everything (well, almost everything) will be somewhere in the Internet cloud, with just the browser, some pretty limited CPU capacity, and a broadband connection required in the client end.
With the emergence of the Cloud, Internet is finally coalescing into the dominant design of computing -- or, perhaps it is the Cloud that is truly going to be the dominant design with the Internet being a component (albeit a crucial one).
The Cloud is not going to be Google's exclusive playground (thank goodness), but if there is one firm that is perfectly positioned to dominate the cloud, it is Google.
The G-people dominate web search, have the best knowledge of user behavior on the net, have a huge server infrastructure in place, and have invested heavily into cloud-like computing architectures and platforms.
Google is also just about the only player that can truly bring the Cloud into the mainstream -- others are still niche players or have too much to lose to make the leap themselves (Microsoft being the obvious example).
1 comment:
It is actually strange that Microsoft is just sitting and watching as the world goes by.
Why haven't we seen a cloud computing environment for ASP.net applications? Where is the SQL Server as a service concept? Microsoft still is pretty good with the developer tools, in general Microsoft developers seem to pretty satisfied on the tools and on the platform. But it is difficult to even think about starting to develop Internet scale (or smaller) applications on a platform, where you have big upfront licensing costs. Costs which are not tied to the success of the application, but to the number of CPUs.
Google now has the desktop, they have the APIs and computing capabilities. They are still lacking on the development tool side, but probably not for long. I would be suprised if we don't see a Google IDE, with nice support for Google Web Toolkit, Google App Engine and all the others in 1-2 years. Probably something that works straight from the browser, allowing you to collaborate on application development like you collaborate on Google docs. Something like http://heroku.com/
I think Microsoft would still have a chance here. A cloud computing environment where you can use the familiar Microsoft technologies, C#, ASP.net and maybe a stripped-down version of SQL Server. The environment would be both available as a service (over the Internet) and as a product (for Enterprises). Thight nice integration to Visual Studio, with it's debugging capabilities. Free for small apps, then pricing per requests, users, cpu hours, gigabytes etc.
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