More broadly, I’ve always been interested in the way people socialize and collaborate online.  The most interesting part of cloud computing is in the network and the interaction between computers—not in individual computers themselves.

 

CH: What do you see as the single most important issue affecting cloud computing today?

BH: The network is getting exponentially faster. It’s Moore’s Law meeting Nielsen’s Law. Not only can you pack tremendous computing power into a mobile phone to access the cloud anywhere, but bandwidth is growing exponentially as well, roughly 50 percent per year.

And it’s starting to be available everywhere. At this point you expect the network to be fast and always-on. Airplanes used to be off-limits to cloud computing, but not anymore. WiFi is becoming standard on planes. People now buy phones expecting 3G data connections—talking has become the “oh yeah” feature at the bottom of a list of a dozen web and data features.

pens behind closed doors. The nice thing about cloud computing is that all these service providers are so publicly accountable for even the slight-est glitch. There’s no tolerance for downtime, which is great for users.

Google’s cloud is made up of a highly resilient network of thousands and thousands of disposable computers, with apps and data spread out on them across geographies. Gmail, for example, is replicated live across multiple datacenters, so if a meteor hits one, the app and data keeps on running smoothly on another.

And efforts like the Data Liberation Front and Google Dashboard make it clear that users maintain control of their data, even when they’re using the cloud. They can take their stuff to go anytime they like, and they can always see how the data is being used. The value to you if you’re a cloud provider is not in locking in users’ data; rather, it’s in the service, the flow of data, transactions, choices. Lock-in and closed formats are a losing strategy. They make you lazy as a provider. And on the web, laziness is deadly, since competitors are a click away.

 

CH: Describe how much of an impact cloud computing will have in the next evolution in computing. How will it affect the everyday computer user?

BH: This shift to cloud computing has already started invisibly for most users. Most people use webmail without realizing it’s essentially a “cloud” app. That may be how they start using other cloud apps. They get invited to collaborate on a document online, and they use that doc every day, and then another, and one day they wake up and realize it’s been months since they’ve opened up their desktop software.

But it’s going to start getting more obvious as people switch to netbooks  and  smartphones, and as they stop having to worry about all the mechanics of backing of their discs, worrying about where they stored something, or hassling with document versions. It’s already making daily life more mobile and more fluid. Even the word developer is becoming more and more synonymous with web developer. The web is now the primary platform for building apps, not an afterthought you hook into an app after it’s built.

Cloud computing is already changing the way businesses, governments, and universities run.  The City of Los Angeles just switched to the cloud using Google Apps. Philadelphia International Airport cuts down on delays and costs by coordinating their operations using Google Docs, and they’re looking at technologies like Google Wave too.

And it’s individuals, too. We hear about soldiers in the desert in Iraq keeping in touch with their families using video chat in Gmail, and checking their voicemail on Google Voice.

The movement away from the desktop and on-premise solutions has been sluggish for software makers with entrenched interests on the desktop. They’re moving so slowly compared to what users want. These fast, lightweight, social, mobile apps are what people are actually using to communicate with each other and get work done. They sprouted in the cloud, they’re built to run in the cloud, and they’re now “growing down” into big enterprises, driven by user demand.

CH:  What are some of the aspects of cloud computing that you are working on that will revolutionize the field?

BH: Everything “cloud” is really about collaboration. It’s not just a larger computer—cloud computing gives birth to a new way of working, where the stuff you produce lives in the center of a social circle and can be collaborated on by everyone in that circle. We’re trying to make that collaboration process more seamless, so sharing is easy and you can work on stuff together without worrying about the mechanics of version control and invites and the like.

I’m not sure people have quite grasped how much of computing can and will shift to the cloud. It’s not that there isn’t ever-growing computing power on the desktop or in beefy all-purpose servers. But the part of computing people really care about—that developers are developing for, and that yields the most interesting real-world applications—is the networked part. As an example, you don’t use Google Docs to write solo reports and print them out to stick on a shelf some-where. You use it to get 10 people to hack out a plan everyone’s happy with in one hour. It’s the networked process that’s revolutionary, not the app used in isolation.

❝Lock-in and closed formats are a losing strategy. They make you lazy as a provider.

And on the web, laziness is deadly, since competitors are a click away.❞

—Bradley Horowitz

 

CH:  What about concerns people have voiced about trusting cloud computing? Do you see these concerns as slowing adoption?

BH: I’d flip that on its head. The providers actually can’t keep up with user and customer demand.  They can’t build this stuff fast enough for what people want to do in the cloud. At universities, for example, it’s students demanding their administrators switch to Gmail. Universities like Arizona State and Notre Dame have switched to cloud-based email, and we’re seeing big businesses like Motorola making the switch, too.

It helps that the stats are finally starting to get out comparing apples to apples. Desktop and on-premises applications break down far more often than web apps, even if you don’t hear about it as often since it hap-

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