I’ve written several post about Cloud Computing over the last few weeks, particularly with the announcements coming out of Google, Amazon, Windows Azure and SalesForce’s latest ventures. But I have not really looked into or discussed what Cloud Computing will actually facilitate, or how it will change computing.
This post by Nicholas Carr (on his Rough Type blog) highlights an interesting point about Cloud Computing. It is not just about replicating current processes and programs more efficiently, it is likely that it will open up a whole new range of activities that in the past may have looked too costly and daunting.
He raises an interesting example of how the NY Times used the Amazon S3 and EC2 services to process some mammoth processes (converting a very large number of their archives from TIFF to PDF formats – to move it all online) at a barely-noticeable cost. It’s likely that the NY Times may not have ventured down this route if they had to undertake this exercise internally… this is the premise of Carr’s post… in essence: What does the cloud allow us to do that we couldn’t do before?
As an aside, I’m a big fan of Carr and his insight, I’ve read a lot of his article’s in the Guardian and sometimes in the FT… here’s a link to his bio….
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