July 24, 2008
Battle for the Cloud: Google vs. Microsoft
Independent developers must choose between two radically different approaches to cloud computing.
What's interesting, however, is that while Microsoft seems to be following Google's lead in advocating cloud computing, its actual implementation couldn't be more different, both technically and philosophically. Customers will have to decide which approach to the cloud works best for them -- and, equally important, so will independent developers.
In the traditional computing model, you use an application to create a document (be it a manuscript, a spreadsheet, a database, or what-have-you). Then, when you want to save the document, the application hands it off to the operating system, which maintains a copy of it in local storage as a file.
Google's model represents a radical departure. In it, the cloud is the computer, from alpha to omega. Because there are no disks or volumes for the user to maintain, there is no need for the artificial concept of "files" or a file system to store them in. Persistent storage is reduced to an abstract concept: All that exist are applications and their associated documents.
Google's brand of cloud computing has other advantages, too. Because the applications exist in the cloud, there is never anything to install and no upgrades or security fixes to manage. In fact, the user is freed from all of the day-to-day interactions with the OS that characterize the traditional desktop computing experience. Certainly there is some kind of OS running beneath the servers that power Google's applications, coupled with some form of organized storage; but these are mere technical details, of no concern to the user.
