Cloud Computing -- When will it be Good Enough? ... UPDATED

Tony Austin
Saturday, 30 August 2008 11:23

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft Office 365

As an extension and alternative to putting content on my web site, I decided to start blogging early in 2005. After looking around at the state of blogging services being then provided, I settled on Google's Blogger service, starting with the blog that I called Notes Tone Unturned.

For the first year or two its availability was somewhat patchy, it's response times (for submitting posts) was very variable and unpredictable, it had annoying problems with uploading images, and so on. Then a year or so ago Google launched an improved service -- they called it "Blogger 2.0" -- and immediately I found it to be much more responsive and reliable than the initial offering.

Blogger 2.0 has a nicer user interface, is faster with much more consistent response times (dependably one or two seconds, compared with 20 to 30 seconds or even more in the early version). There's only the extremely occasional outage or other technical problem. And very importantly they incrementally and seamlessly keep improving it: here a new "Save Now" button, there a streamlined dashboard making it a lot easier to manage your posts, and so on. It's getting close to the renowned speed and reliability of the Google search engine.

The moral of this tiny case study is that it will require very significant (Google-like) infrastructure to be put in place before any cloud computing offering can be classed as "good enough" for widespread adoption.

As for myself, I haven't yet had the need or desire to use other Google online services (such as Google Apps) nor those of other providers like Salesforce.com. But obviously at least some of them already are "good enough" and there's bound to be more of them popping up over the next few years, eventually becoming ubiquitous. It will certainly be fascinating to watch how it develops!

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