Living in the Clouds - Is computer software becoming obsolete?

Jun 10, 2008

Like a growing number of companies, the New York Times has its head in the clouds—at least the part of its head that contains its memory. Without using a byte of its own processing power, the newspaper last month provided free, fully searchable access to its 1851 to 1922 archive—more than 15 million articles. How? Derek Gottfrid, the Times’s senior software architect, outsourced and used Amazon’s cloud computing service. The result is the TimesMachine, a cool application that runs on the paper’s Web site and is stored on Amazon’s servers. “If we had to do it internally, we probably wouldn’t have done it,” Gottfrid tells NEWSWEEK.

If you thought Amazon sold only books, you probably think Google is just a search engine. Both Amazon and Google—along with Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Yahoo and other small players—have just started rolling out cloud computing services. Get used to hearing that expression. In April, Gartner Research dubbed it “the biggest buzz phrase of 2008, [but] little understood until 2009.” At its most basic, cloud computing is the ability to use software and data on the Internet (a.k.a., the cloud) instead of on your hard drive.

Ten years ago if you wanted to do something with your PC you needed to buy software and install it. The ascent of Web 2.0—to deploy an older buzz phrase—is making that practice obsolete. “Suddenly, what cloud computing allows is for businesses and individuals to use it as if it were their own. It makes computing a heck of a lot less expensive,” says tech journalist Nicholas Carr, author of “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.”

Driving this leap forward is the proliferation of …

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