Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [6]
Just as the cloud will offer digital storage, it will also offer incredible processing power. This will range from your cell phone asking for extra help from a couple of machines in your home, to paying a fee to rent a few thousand computers from some service provider for a couple of minutes. Your health information might be mined for patterns by a couple of servers in your home. A service provider might keep the index of all your information up to date so that your cell phone isn’t slowed down by index “crawling.”
Of course, even today’s smartphones already boast impressive processing power, doing things like voice recognition, movie playback, and running full-blown databases. For most tasks you will already have enough computing at hand. However, cloud processing isn’t always just about computational muscle. Cloud processing can also provide simplicity. Instead of installing and maintaining software in all of the computing devices in your home, it can be much simpler to install to just one home server, and have the other devices just act as terminals to the server. Then you only have one computer that requires upgrades, license verification, and other management drudgery. The same can happen across the Internet, and we already see Internet-based alternatives to traditional desktop software, including e-mail, instant messaging, word processing, spreadsheets, and backups.
In the future, you probably won’t know or care whether an application is running on your device, or whether it is running in a cloud server and your device is just a terminal. Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, describes it this way:
All your devices will be appliance-like. You’ll buy them to suit your need or tastes. Phones, PCs, Xboxes, whatever. You’ll go to the Web and license software that is intended to be used on these various appliance-like devices. When you turn it on and log-in for the first time and “claim” the device as yours, the things that should be on it (the right data, the appropriate version of a given app for that kind of device) simply appear. When you run the app and use the data, it is automatically sync’ed so that there’s only ever temporarily a “dirty” copy of data or settings on the device that isn’t also present in the cloud. When you recycle a device and “unclaim” or “disown” it, your stuff vanishes.
Many Web service providers are in the same boat with you. They often don’t care where your data or where their own data actually resides, because they, too, may outsource their storage and processing needs, paying for whatever capacity they use when and as they use it. Many companies run their entire businesses using remote servers, without having to invest in computers, storage, or associated software. To serve this need, Amazon, which has vast amounts of excess storage, has a service called EC2, for Elastic Compute Cloud. Likewise, Microsoft has Azure, a cloud-based operating system that will let companies develop and run Web applications without setting up their own data center. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has predicted that nearly all Internet data centers will be outsourced in this way by 2020.
Cloud computing will lead to a single, integrated e-memory experience. Every device will act as an access point to recall from your e-memory. And every device will also become a source of information feeding into your e-memory, helping to record your experience.
Most people’s cloud-interface device of choice is going to be a small, lightweight device that combines the functions of a cell phone, a camera, a personal digital assistant, a Web browser, an MP3 player, a GPS locator, and any other sensors and functions that can be crammed into it. Early versions of these