Whats the analogy between electricity and the kind of “cloud computing” that Google is attempting?
What happened to mechanical power a hundred years ago is happening to computing today. Through the end of the 19th century, if your business wanted to run a machine, you had no alternative but to produce the energy to run it. So you had companies building big power generation operations within their own business–first hydraulic and steam, and then electrical. But when Nicola Tesla invented the alternating current transfer of electricity, things changed: You had the basis for a grid, allowing energy to be piped in from somewhere far away. Samuel Insull realized that the economic advantages of centralizing this shared resource were so great that companies would stop producing their own power and just plug into the grid. The analogy to our broadband computing grid is pretty clear. Data processing, storage and software applications that used to run locally are now being supplied by big central computing stations. They’re becoming, in essence, computing utilities. Is Google the company tha
