Cloud computing: does the term make you cringe? It’s one of those phrases like Web 2.0 that gets thrown around without really ever getting defined. Hearing the term at a meeting or in a panel discussion, you are almost forced to nod your head and say “ah, yes, cloud computing.” But what the ef is it? Wired magazine does a profile on chief software architect Ray Ozzie of Microsoft examining MS’s role in bringing applications that normally sat on one’s PC into the spaces of the internet. And that’s all cloud computing really is: transferring the balance of where the data gets crunched from one’s own computer to the vast servers of the three big players, Google, Microsoft and Amazon.com, so an individual can use ANY computer and log into their documents. A bit from the article:

Ozzie unveils the new products that he’s been laboring over for more than two years: a top-secret set of initiatives designed to make Microsoft as dominant in the cloud era as it was in the days of the desktop. First up is a new operating system for Web-based applications, codenamed Red Dog—it’s Windows for the cloud. (See Editor’s update below.) Then comes a demonstration of Live Mesh, which will allow people to seamlessly synchronize all their information with as many people and places as they want, across as many devices (computer, phone, camera) as they want. Finally, another engineer demonstrates how Microsoft will make even its legacy apps accessible via the cloud. It’s a shocker. After years of Microsoft insisting that the desktop is the only proper place for its crown-jewel applications—the venerable Office suite—it appears that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will levitate from the desktop and become services as well. In this demo, an Excel spreadsheet is running in the cloud with almost all its functionality intact, including features like auto-complete and auto-formatting as well as built-in collaboration and a way to link the spreadsheet results to emails and Web pages.

Now, Amazon.com has been offering its Elastic Compute Cloud service for some time now, which provides companies fully customizable computing storage on Amazon.com’s vast server base, thus making the computing and storage a sort of utility like electricty or gas(For more on this topic, check out the amazing book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World From Edison to Google ) User’s can scale down or up based on their needs at any given time, given them the flexibility in what they need.

And Google has also been quick to provide its millions of users free applications through Google Docs that are aimed directly at the Microsoft’s bread and butter Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It’s definitely been a long time coming for MS to offer up these programs online (still can’t say cloud) and as someone who is obviously invested (Full Disclosure: I work for Microsoft, but you know that) in Microsoft’s future, it is exciting to see Mr. Ozzie take the steps to propel Microsoft into the battle of the web.

It will be interesting to see over the next few years if Microsoft can sucessfully find a way to seemlessly intergrate all of their services (Office, Mobile, Zune, Xbox, etc.) so that it truly can be a connected experience across multiple platforms. One of the most frustrating parts of technology is when products that commonsense dictate should talk with eachother are completely separate, using entirely different software. As Ozzie says in the article

Our greatest challenge may lie within. Every day we make a choice to focus on the outside competitor or the competitor within.

For the full article:

Wired Magazine: Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back into Startup Mode