Cloud computing a ray of sunshine on Google horizon?

Stan Beer
Sunday, 30 March 2008 13:45

Opinion and Analysis

Google's earnings have slowed; it's stock is down 40% from its jumbo $747 high in November 2007. This is arguably the first true test of the mettle of the world's newest technology super giant. Is Eric Schmidt's vision of a world blanketed by cloud computing dominated by Google a ray of sunshine on Google's horizon or is search the only thing the company is good for?

Google has released a plethora of beta products since it started and many of them are absolutely fantastic. But the only thing the company has ever made serious money on is search ads.

Granted, search has so far proven to be a killer app for the Web. However, there's no doubt that other types of Google products have gone mainstream, such as Google Maps, Gmail and Google Calendar, while others, such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets, are slowly catching on as a nervous Microsoft watches from the wings.

Many of us now use Gmail and Google Calendar as our primary email and calendaring applications (at least I and many of my colleagues do). There are now so many ways to connect to the Internet that it makes little sense to tie yourself down to a particiular computer because your emails and calendar entries happen to be sitting on a particular hard drive.

As a frequent business traveller, it's handy to be able to access my email and calendar system from any computer connected to the net in the world. Extend that to other office productivity and business applications, add in a cloud telecommunications product and things start to get interesting, not to mention cheaper, for a plethora of users, many of which have been precluded from the conventional world of desktop computing because of the high cost of hardware and software.

So why is Google currently in the box seat, while Microsoft and a host of cloud computing wannabees remain in the equivalent of the nose bleed section at the cloud computing game? CONTINUED