According to John Herlihy, Google’s vice-president of Global Ad Operations, the conventional desktop PC is rapidly becoming irrelevant. Between the explosive sales of smart phones and other mobile devices, netbooks, and laptops it appears the "traditional" means of computing are changing quickly.

Google of course has a vested interest in this game, but it’s clear they have a point. The power of the PC is moving to the cloud for all of the heavy lifting. Buying ever more powerful equipment is simply unnecessary. The enterprise can do much of its computing in the cloud, and with Apple’s latest moves the consumer will soon find media there as well.

So now that the cloud is fully established for both consumers and enterprises alike, it’s just a matter of time before the old desktop PC goes the way of the dinosaur.

On the heels of my Top Cloud Computing Stories of 2009 comes (appropriately enough) my Top 5 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2010. Let’s jump right into it.

1) There Will be Another Outage, and No One Will Panic
In 2009 there were two significant outages of Google’s Gmail service, which rendered it unavailable temporarily. The most interesting part of the story is that the outages are so rare that they were deemed newsworthy by the mainstream media. In 2010 there will likely be an outage of another major Cloud Computing vendor, and the reactions in the media will be the same. It will be covered broadly for 2 reasons:

• Outages are very rare
• Critics and IT luddites are looking for a story to keep the business side off of their backs

Either way, vendors have their best and brightest working to ensure that they don’t happen, and if they do happen they will be short-lived and you won’t even have to think about it. The problem fixes itself.

2) Google Enterprise Applications Will Gain Large Acceptance
In 2009 Google gained significant traction in the market with its Enterprise Apps (Gmail, Docs, Calendar) and in 2010 that trend will only accelerate. Enterprises spend approximately $17b annually on Microsoft Office, and Google’s pricing model combined with its flexibility mean Microsoft could be in trouble. Organizations are always looking for ways to save money, and this is an easy one.

3) Consolidation of Cloud Computing Vendors The big players in cloud computing (Salesforce, Google, Amazon Web Services) have all built good products with basic functionality, and rely on external players to augment them. They focus on what they do best, and outsource the rest.

As many of these augmentations become more mature and become more native to the platforms, look to see the smaller companies to get swallowed up. This creates more value for the big vendors while limiting their exposure to development risk, and increases their internal talent pools.

Combine the business reasons for acquisitions with the ongoing improvements capital markets, and consolidations should make a big comeback this year.

4) "Young" Vendors Will See Explosive Growth
As more parts of the various cloud computing platforms are further opened up for development, expect to see fresh young startups blossoming to fill business requirements. I also fully expect to see our company’s offerings around sales, service, and call centers to grow for these exact reasons.

5) Cloud Computing’s Growth Accelerates
The economic turmoil has been going for over 2 years now, and it appears we are in a new normal. This environment has forced companies to cut costs and run leaner than in previous years. With IT budgets either shrinking or headcount being reduced, it is no longer optional to optimize staff’s time. Organizations do not want to waste resources on maintaining email servers or other on-premise applications when on-demand applications in the cloud make more sense financially.

Did you know the federal government spends over $75B annually on IT? With that number in mind, you can imagine the enormous amount of manpower it takes to choose, customize, build, deploy, and maintain separate instances of applications to run the government’s operations. I cannot imagine a more perfect environment to deploy cloud computing, and it is apparent that the President “gets it” too.

In keeping with his initiative for lowering the costs of running government, the White House this year launched apps.gov, an online repository for federal agencies to explore and purchase cloud-based IT services. So instead of having to individually seek out vendors, government agencies now have a one-stop shop to get most of what they’re looking for. And guess what – salesforce.com and Google are featured vendors.  

In a year of giant bailouts, it’s about time the taxpayer got a break from politicians, except this time it’s technology that’s doing all the heavy lifting.

You know the cloud computing model has hit it big when the second-largest city in the United States makes the switch. Los Angeles had previously been running Novell’s Groupwise (ouch!) and one can imagine that with the economic downturn drastic cost-cutting measures had to be made. This year they made the move to use Gmail for 30,000 city employees along with Google Docs. So instead of wasting IT resources to maintain an email server, they can now deploy those resources to initiatives that provide more value for the city.

The case for cloud computing was so clear that the LA City Council voted unanimously. Microsoft sent their big guns in to try and derail the Google move, but to no avail. Cloud computing has arrived in major fashion, and it’s become quite clear that vendors must either compete in that arena or they are in trouble.

In February, Google made the news somewhat ignominiously when it’s Gmail service was unavailable for several hours, and then again in September. Our own Reid Carlberg’s response to the issue garnered much interest on sites like Reddit and Stumbleupon: “I don’t care.” 

While his subject line was obviously written for effect, his reasoning is absolutely sound:

• Outages of Gmail are extremely rare
• Their support teams often know about a problem before you do
• You don’t need to buy additional maintenance to fix the problem
• Nobody lost any data

We’re pretty sure you’ve heard these themes before from marketing departments espousing the benefits of cloud computing (guilty!), but this is a prime example of why it works so well.

Anyone who has worked in an enterprise email environment managed by Microsoft Exchange, Novell, Lotus or any of the other major players has seen their work email unavailable but at a much higher frequency than Google. The odds of getting information about those outages from your IT was like pulling teeth, because they don’t want egg on their face.

Switching our corporate email to Gmail not only saved us a large amount of money each year, it has provided rock-solid reliability and a level of support that can’t be found anywhere else. Gmail rocks, plain and simple. 

(credit to Interperetivist Clog)

As the New York Times’ David Pogue put succinctly in his article, Apple may have stepped in it by rejecting Google’s "Google Voice" application from their App Store. Speculation abounds, but many feel AT&T put the kibosh on the application – highlighting the dangers mobile device manufacturer’s face when tethering themselves to cellular service providers.

With the FCC launching their own investigation into this mess, Google has apparently moved on. They are now said to be developing a web version of the Google Voice service, which will offer the same functionality through the iPhone’s Safari browser. This comes as no surprise, as they did the same thing with their Google Latitude application.

All of this only further serves to highlight the importance of net neutrality, something I have been passionate about for a number of years. Internet service providers want desperately to filter content, giving preferential treatment to those who pay extra for tiered services. They claim that since they own a section of the delivery mechanism (the “end of the pipe,” as it were) they should be able to control what passes through those pipes.

If net neutrality is not supported, services like this from Google, Yahoo, Amazon.com, even salesforce.com – could be significantly crippled, devastating the productivity of hundreds millions of people around the world in both their personal and professional lives.

I take the view that the Internet was originally built with public money, and is continually supported with both public tax dollars and ISP subscription fees. If the ISPs can’t get their act together to make a profit at the rates they charge, then they should raise their rates to a level the market will still support – not suppress everyone else with draconian law.

On the second day keynote at Google I/O they unveiled something big.  This is new product is built by the guys who brought us Google Maps.  Remember how surprised you were the first time you saw interactive maps IN THE BROWSER and could zoom down and see your own house?  Well these guys asked themselves an interesting question:  “What would email look like if it was invented today rather than 40 years ago before there was even an internet? “  The answer to that question is Google Wave.

Google Wave is a paradigm shift to be sure.  It takes email and turns it on it’s head.  It tries to remove the pain points of email and combine it with tools that didn’t exist 40 years ago such as instant messaging, blogs, wikis, etc…  At first blush it isn’t evident how different this can be, but as they showed more of the feature set it became apparent that this has the potential to be something very special.

There is a concept of a “Wave”.  A Wave is on the server and as with email you can send it (or more accurately share it) with others.  However it is collaborative.  Multiple people can update a wave simultaneously, and it has a very rich “track changes” type of feature built in.  Those who have not yet read the Wave just see the final version, those who had read the original version see the changes highlighted, or with a strikethrough font as appropriate.  Things get really interesting when you see the playback feature which has music like controls with a sliding timeline that allows you to “playback” the changes.  You can do this with all changes, or just the changes made by a specific person.

Changes to a Wave are not merely seen upon save, but as each character is changed it is simultaneously changed on anyones screen who is viewing or editing it in real time which is pretty amazing to watch.  It also incorporates the idea of chat within a Wave, and again you can see character-by-character typing.  So there is no more waiting for 30 seconds for a friend to type a reply, you see it all real-time.  These chats or comments can be placed in a Wave document around a specific section to have context.

There are other features such as drag-and-drop of pictures in a Wave from the desktop and again they appear immediately for others viewing that Wave.  A Wave could be used as a quick way to share photos, multiple people can contribute their photos and you can view a combined slideshow of all photos, etc…  There is even a great feature with one click of a button to share your wave on a blog.  Since a Wave is live on the server all changes made to the Wave are immediately reflected on the blog, just like if someone else was viewing the Wave from the Wave client.

Waves are not just to replace email, but also documents.  The development team showed how they use it to take notes in meetings, build specs and even build a “wiki” like repository of a Wave that combines links to other Waves.  Initially this is only for rich text (think documents or email) but they plan to extend this concept to spreadsheets and presentations.

I was especially struck how the developers who know this product, designed it and built it are still learning how to use it.  To illustrate this they showed a real example.  They sent out a Wave to the team asking about going to a movie.  Pretty soon people started replying to all (treating it like normal email) and soon the chain was cluttered.  Then someone decided to update the original Wave and add three sections for people to add their names to: (Yes, No and Maybe).  Then people just added their names under the appropriate section and it was easy to see who was coming and who wasn’t without having to cull through a bunch of replies.  Suddenly the wave was an intelligent form instead of just an email.  New technology is great, but if you don’t use the new paradigm it will not bring much benefit.

Now this is all well and good, but are enterprises really going to embrace this?  I think Google was very smart in the fact that they designed this in such a way that most of it is open sourced and you can take this technology and build your own Wave server if you don’t/won’t trust Google with your Waves.  They also opened up rich API’s so a Wave can be extended to do things like update a Twitter feed.  I truly think that IF this ends up giving Enterprises the level of control and security they desire that this could truly be an email killer and bring radical productivity and collaboration gains to all of us at home and at work.
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I have an iPhone and for the most part I love it.  I like the interface, the seamless access to music and all the apps on the AppStore.  I don’t like the shortcomings, such as the lack of cut and paste, no video capture, lack of landscape keyboard, etc… Many of these will be addressed soon with the 3.0 OS, which is already in public beta.  We have created six apps for the AppStore ourselves and we know and love Objective C.  But what about Android?  I’ve heard a lot about it, especially when the G1 launched, but I’ve never personally used it or seen it in action beyond some POC work by some of the developers on my team.

That is about to change.  Google did a very smart thing, which at first I thought was very generous, then I realized was a brilliant move to buy mindshare.  They gave all 4,000 of us a free Android phone just for coming to their conference.  But we weren’t 4,000 random people.  We are thought leaders and developers from all walks of life that know enough or care enough about Google to spend a couple of days learning more about it.  Even with this “Google Centric” crowd I saw a lot of iPhones and Blackberries and very few G1’s.  But now all of us have a free Android phone, and not only that but it is unlocked and we have a SIM card for 30 days of voice and data access.

I’d say the odds of all of us trying out some development on this platform just increased dramatically.  I’m curious to see what comes out of this or what types of skunkwork apps my team can put together now that we have a spare phone we can actually try things out on.
 

I just got back from the recent Google I/O developer conference and was struck by it’s simplicity.  It was short, only two days. It provided great content.  It provided great food and snacks.  It even had the requisite Wii and Rockband pods and upped the ante with Pool, Foosball and chair massage. 

So enough with the format, what was the message?  The message was all about the importance of HTML5 and how it was supported by all “modern” browsers.  The browser made by the boys in Redmond was not on this “modern” list.  I haven’t followed the HTML 5 standard that closely but was surprised along with others with what could be done within the browser without a plugin.  Does this mean Adobe should worry about Flash marketshare dropping?  Not immediately, but in a couple of years, maybe so.  In a nutshell you have some new tags and features to consider:

<canvas>  This tag allows you to have pixel level control in the browser and do things such as draw a diagonal line.  They even created O3D which allows you to create compelling 3D graphics and use the graphics card, not the CPU.

<video>  Now you can embed a video as easy as an image without worrying about plugins or codecs.

Geolocation – Your PC or Laptop can now be as smart as your iPhone and you can choose to share your location with the browser to get location awareness in Maps or other apps.

App Cache and Database -  HTML 5 allows you to do some interesting caching and has it’s own SQL Lite DB (very similar to Adobe AIR).  This can allow you to cache portions of your app for faster access or to do interesting offline applications in the browser.  Google Mail already uses this approach on the iPhone and Android.

Web Workers – An API for running background Javascript so you can do things asynchronously and not slow down the user experience.

The big question of course is when is the HTML5 support going to be broad enough that developers can take advantage of all of this and really exploit it?  Google asked that we as developers push that curve and not allow these features to lie dormant for years as was the case with the foundations of AJAX.

My next post will talk more about Google Wave and some other announcements that came out of I/O 2009.
 

Remember When Video Killed The Radio Star?

By now we should recognize the signs of a major shift caused by a new, “disruptive” technology. After all, we have seen it happen so many times before. The only difference is that today the shifts are quick and dramatic, catching off guard anybody that dares to stand flatfooted. So what is causing the tremors this time? Cloud computing! And it is already hitting with a force that is off the scale, especially for organizations that are not looking for it or prefer to live in the “legacy” world of on-premises business computing strategy and applications.

Perhaps “Video Killed The Radio Star” is not the appropriate analogy to communicate a dramatic shift in computing technology, but for some reason that tune keeps playing in my head whenever I think about this evolution in computing. MTV was a dramatic shift that stopped careers for those unwilling to accept it. It opened the door for a new breed of performers that were willing to adapt. Yet it was only the pinnacle of the iceberg for all the technology changes that followed – from CDs replacing cassettes and vinyl, to iTunes and single song downloads.

Cutting edge performers had been putting out music videos since the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, not to mention the entire Monkeys TV show (which drove their albums to the top of the charts!). But it was the new technology of cable television and MTV that was the game changer. Cloud computing is the cable television of IT world. IT directors and departments will either have to grasp and ride the movement of computing to web service providers such as saleforce.com, Amazon Web Services and Google Apps, or find themselves and their employers on the clearance shelf of the business world because they have become irrelevant in the market, just like 8-track tapes.

The newspaper industry has experienced this shift as a result of technology change that helps to illustrate this point. The static newspaper has been driven down by the dynamic web page and email alerts for news. You don’t have to own, staff, and maintain huge printing plants running around the clock in order to sell and deliver the news today. Corporate size is not the advantage in distributing the news as it once had been thanks to the internet. Wireless and handheld access to the Internet has further made the hard copy delivery model a competitive disadvantage. The result has been a proliferation of news and information sites, and a long line of newspaper bankruptcies. The down economy has served to accelerate this phenomenon.  Think about this analogy as it relates to cloud computing. You can read other Model Metrics blogs from our technologists that explain in detail how we are leveraging salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services (the business unit) and Google Apps to create an elastic, powerful, and extremely cost effective new world order of computing.

Google “Amazon Web Services” if you want another perspective. My thoughts here are to sound the alarm. There is a change coming and you need to look up now to “the cloud” to take advantage of this opportunity to achieve competitive advantage, and in some cases survival, before it is too late.

Video killed the radio star…Cloud computing is going to kill traditional IT. Those that look to the cloud will be the new winners.