John Markoff has a report in today’s Times about Microsoft’s move to online software delivery and hosting of customer data, a la Google. I am amazed at how quickly computing is moving off the PC: I’m even more amazed at how easily I now entrust even fairly sensitive data – like my medical records – to Google (I have a bunch of stuff on Google Docs).
Microsoft is countering with Windows Live, trying to move selected software and data for small-biz customers to their server ‘Cloud’ by leveraging the Windows user base (shades of the browser wars). I’m not sure MS is my preferred vendor here (nor sure why I trust Google so much) but it will be interesting to see how this plays out…
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Computing isn’t moving away from PC’s, Americans are. Americans like centralized services and dislike everything “personal”. There’s a new of fascination in being part of large institutions. Maybe it’s the idea that if you can’t succeed on your own, you need only press a button and share the success of a gigantic corporation.