Is Cloud Computing finally useful?

The technology landscape is filled with examples of things that are great ideas, but when first introduced were a bit ahead of their time, and as such, failed to be embraced by the marketplace.

Hosted applications (often referred to as “Cloud Computing”) is one such example. I remember in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s when “Application Service Provider” was the buzzword of the day. In many cases, it meant the same thing as vendors mean today when they say theirs is a Cloud Computing application… the hosted application is maintained in the provider’s datacenter. Google Apps is one such example. What made the ASP craze of the 2000’s less than successful was that it had deal with the limited internet connectivity of the day. I still remember dial-up internet, and leaving my PC online all night to download just a few megabytes of music from Napster. (Yes, I now realize it was wrong to download music without paying for it, and I erased all my pirated downloads long ago… but that’s a different topic entirely.) Why would anyone want to make an application only accessible through that type of internet connection? People decided they would much rather download their data (email, word docs, etc) to the local PC, where I can be sure it’s always quickly available.

A couple years ago, I stopped using Microsoft Outlook (a traditional application that’s designed to download data to the local PC) and switched entirely to using the web interface of Google Apps (a “cloud application” that’s designed to leave data on the server). It was hard at first. I had to re-train some of my thinking about how the app should work, and re-learn some of my long-ago-memorized keyboard shortcuts before using Gmail was as quick as using Outlook for me. But the switch paid off, and pretty soon I was saying “Why didn’t I do this sooner? Why doesn’t everybody do this?”. I haven’t worried about backing up my email, or archiving the old data in my PST file, emptying my deleted items folder, or de-duplicating my email for years, despite the fact that I help clients do these things regularly.

Another example: I was browsing the internet on my phone the other day, and it suddenly occurred to me how incredibly useful it was. Sure, it’s slightly slower than the serious web browsing I do with my laptop. But almost anything I want to do online could be done from my phone. Which is really nice when I’m away from my desk and need to send an email, file a trouble ticket for a customer, download and listen to the MP3 of a webinar I missed, or download the latest episode of a podcast while I’m stuck in traffic.

The first internet-connected phone I purchased was in the year 2000, but it was far from useful. What took so long? My take is that the idea was ahead of the infrastructure that was needed to support it. The browser on that phone was so primitive, and the connection speed through the cell phone company so slow that while it was a great concept, it was completely useless. I returned the phone within a month.

For those of us who occasionally ponder that “computers haven’t really changed in the last 10 years”, we shouldn’t forget that while most of the ideas are the same as 10 or even 20 years ago, many of them are becoming useful for the first time. Years ago they were just good concepts, but lousy products. That’s definite progress.