Dash For Power

In it’s recent issue Business Week surveyed many experts to bring us up to date on who is where on the new developing Cloud Power. This is the linking of millions of mainframes to use their occasional down time while another is temporarily overloaded, and thus increase the bandwidth of all to quick and easy access to any branch of government, police, private or public more immediately, and much more seamless than thought possible up to now. Business Week (BW) discusses the strengths and weakness of the five main contenders for world dominance in overwhelming Cloud Power. Those Big Five are described as Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo and Google. We all deal with each at some time or level, and thus it seemed the BW summary of best likely performance by each, and who is hitting home runs while others are swinging away during their at bats. Who’s tipping his hat at the cheering crowd for another home run?

It is not Mr Amazon, BW says, the first but now the weakest, may come back. It is not Microsoft, perhaps wedded to their proprietary software, which could be a handicap.But they are building massive data centers in Illinois and Siberia. It is not IBM, King of business computing and traditional super computers, although they are joining with the leader to create a formidable new entity. It is not Yahoo, smaller and weaker than it’s mighty rival and with software not completely suited to cloud computing.

It is Google, the only search engine company built from the ground up around hardware. BW says by investing more than $2 billion a year in data centers makes Google by far and away the leader in Cloud computing. More news on this, as we hear: we’ll Google you to make sure it gets there a millisecond before we push send. Amazing, a name from the comics 50 years ago makes us old timers feel all Googlie, part of Barney’s family again. I doubt that Barnie is the entry code at Menlo Park. At any rate, this is good to know, that Google’s Cloud power is capable of expanding, billowing out, all our brains. And that, some would say, is a good thing.

Derek Dashwood

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Brain Foods-Smarten Up!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.