Head in the Cloud
If you're curious about "cloud computing," Nick Carr's latest piece in The Guardian gives a nice overview of the subject. Carr became infamous for his widely misunderstood book Does IT Matter? His latest book is The Big Switch, a short, punchy history of technology that supports Carr's current idee fixe: just as electricity became a utility in the late 19th century, computing power is increasingly being provided the same way (in other words, it's now "in the cloud.")
Examples abound, but consider SmugMug (where I store my photos.) Rather than build a huge data center itself, SmugMug relies on Amazon's S3 service, which is essentially a computational utility for storage. (Amazon also has another service that that is even more utility-like, EC2.)
In any event, Carr makes a compelling case. More details can be found in this piece from Technology Review, which discusses Carr's prognostications. For an overview of some of the legal/biz issues, check this out--a couple years old, but still useful, in my view.
(Cloud illustration by tinney used under Creative Commons license.)
