Ok, so everyone has an opinion - but that's what blogs are for, right? So here's my take on cloud computing, S+S and all those cool new devices we're seeing....
Cloud computing is different from most of today’s hosting solutions. For example, Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite - www.microsoft.com/online) is really about hosting existing systems like Exchange in our data centres instead of yours. That does offer some real savings due to simple economy of scale, but that’s not really what I’d call cloud computing.
With cloud computing, we’re talking about a completely new platform in the internet that provides the basic services that allow you to build completely new types of applications. That platform is like an operating system that’s built from the ground up to provide massive and very flexible scale, geographic presence and complete reliability. At present, there’s really only a few examples of these cloud based operating systems including Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, Google's App Engine and Microsoft’s Azure.
These cloud based systems provide all the infrastructure and flexible scale that enable new applications and solutions in ways that we’ve never seen before. Because you can write some code on your local laptop, post it up to the cloud and scale from no users to millions very easily (well, that’s the promise) we have the ultimate innovation platform. You can literally start in your garage and overnight get millions of customers.
The business model for the innovator is basically pay-as-you-go so as millions of users come on board, you’ll have to pay for the resources they use. Of course maybe the innovator pays, maybe the user pays, or maybe advertisers pay. If one of the many services that the cloud infrastructure provides is an advertising engine then it should be possible that your new application could at least pay for itself through advertising.
Ok, so we have a few new super flexible, ultra reliable “mainframes in the sky” that enable innovation in computing that we’ve never seen before. But what’s that got to do with Microsoft’s “Software + Services” spiel?
Well, first of all it’s all about the Software. That software can be hosted locally by you or in the internet by others. In both cases, the software delivers a service to you. Those services might be email, displaying photos and maps, communicating with people, doing accounting etc. Cloud computing and online hosting provide some of those services delivered over the internet while local devices (Servers, PC’s, Phones, Xboxes etc) provide other services locally. The combination of Software (on your local server or device) plus Services (from the internet) take the best of both worlds (local processing power and control plus massive scale and low cost generic services) to deliver solutions that make the most of all available computing power where it's best utilized.