For at least the past year, okay, maybe two, there's been a lot of discussion about Cloud Computing and something of these discussions have been at best .... enigmatic, obscure or just plain opaque.
First, a comment from the distant past: A million years ago, I was working with HP on the introductionn of HP's line of consukmer PCs, the Pavillion. One of the things I learned from that product introduction was that must innovations in computing don't come from the business side of computing but from the consumer side. For example: USB slots and headphone jacks on the front of the computer? That's all consumer innovation.
Anyway, that draws me closer to the task at hand and that's cloud coputing. My conteintion is that cusomers will adopts (or have already adopted cloud computing) at a much faster rate that businesses.
Webmail is just a case in point. We can point all we want at the convenience of walking up to any networked PC and using our email, but the real boon here is that we do not every, never have to work about how much disk space our mail is taking up or, (and I'm not pointing fingers here), that last time your successfully backed up your computer.
And, by the way, don't forget that your keeping your contacts there as well.
gMail and Yahoo got into a competition about how much space they would give their users from free, but the big inflection point came when Amazon introduced S3, their version of unlimited, inexpensive storage. Amazon's model is wholesale so several very smart little companies sprung up to capitalize on Amazone S3. Peraonlly, I use Jungle Disk and a Fireforx extrenstion called OpenFox S3. Hundreds of other samll companies have sprung up offer other specialized servcies, but, if all you want is something that looks like another diski on your desktop and and automated backup, Jungle Disk is absolutely the way to go. It's cross platform which means I have it installed on my Ubuntu, Macs and Wi---dows machines.
Other, less exoteric cloud computing services to consider would be where your story your photographs and, again, both Yahoo and Google have this covered for you. I've been a fan of flickr since it's inception and have even been written up in a bood that describes an art project I created there.
And, regarding things like documents and speaksheets and etc. Google has that covered for your as well.
Sooner or later we're going to have some Serious Questions regarding hof much of our lives we've giving over to Goggle and Yahoo, But in the meantime, I'm going to put as much as I can into the clould and let someone else worry and drive failures, back up / restores and disaster recovery.
