Cast your mind back to 1995 when the chairman of Oracle, Larry Ellison stated “The personal computer is a ridiculous device”, later followed by “It's too hard to use, too powerful, too costly...” Larry Ellison was off course championing what he thought was the PC’s replacement the NC or Network Computer. The idea behind the NC was not a bad one, everything was stored on centrally held servers (on the Internet) where you didn’t have to worry about how it was going to be backed up and you could access your information from any NC device no matter where you were in the world. The problem was his idea was probably 14 years to early and since then the PC has become slim lined and very cheap.
Today we store a lot of our information online (or dare I call it the cloud?). As consumers we store our photos on flikr, backup up our files using BT Digital Vault and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, we download and store our music on the Internet, we watch TV and films over the Internet and we log into our PC’s or servers at home using programs such as GoToMyPC. Without realising it PC’s started to fulfil the role of Network Computers with the advent of faster broadband connections. But it is not just PC’s that get to play in this new interactive world there are a multitude of devices that access the Internet daily such as Smart Mobile phones, games consoles, set top boxes and even common house hold appliances.
As things are going it appears more and more of the things we do on our computers will be hosted online. The companies providing us with these services will need to scale to meet these demands and to help them meet these demands, is my favourite buzz word of the year “the cloud”. As a consumer I am not too worried about where my data is stored or where my services are provided from as long as it is secure and I can get to my data. One of the biggest problems for services and goods companies is the age old problem of anticipating demand. If I overspend on my infrastructure to supply demand I have costs I will find harder to recoup because demand was not as high as I anticipated. Demand will not always be consistent and so as a company I would like to have the resources on tap I can pay for when I need them instantly, without having to fork out for large infrastructure I will only use intermittently.
Eventually if (and this is a big if) cloud computing takes off in a big way we may find that we no longer need the benefits of a powerful PC. Soon the very desktops we use could be stored in a “Cloud Computing Container”. No longer would we need to worry about upgrades to our operating systems, performance or the software we use - all of this would be taken care of for us. All we would need to access our desktops is a simple Internet enabled computer or dare I say Network Computer?