Dreaming About Cloud Computing

Approximately 1 week ago I took about a short nap, and after this I realized that I thing about cloud computing a lot. During this nap I dreamed about having online access to all of my work documents and fun files, I could retrieve my music playlists from anywhere, and work on vector based graphics at home. Will this dream come true in the future? I think yes. When Google Docs was released a few years ago, I was totally amazed. If someone had told me in 2000 that word processing, spreadsheeting, and creating presentations could all be done online, I would have called them crazy. Although these are somewhat limited when compared to their desktop counterparts, they have features that can create high quality documents for everyday use. Cloud computing is also evolving at a rapid rate. New features are constantly being added to Google Docs, and some other applications such as the Zoho suite have even more advanced features (especially their presentation software). Besides the standard applications, cloud computing is also getting into other realms such as graphic editing. Today I discovered Project Draw which is feature-rich web-based vector drawing application. Although not as complete as Corel Draw, it again gets the job done for those common everyday documents. Besides the current state and rapid advancement of cloud computing, the infrastructure is also improving. Browsers are becoming faster and Google's browser Chrome emphasizes the use of online applications with its Create Application Shortcut menu option. This combined with increased internet speeds, more efficient data centers, and greater allotment of online disk space (Gmail in 2005 had a 1 GB storage, now it is >7 GB, more than the hard drive on my 2001 laptop!!) will all help speed up the evolution of cloud computing. To summarize, cloud computing is here to stay and will continue to increase in popularity as desktop applications move to the cloud. In the future we'll all be saying, "I can't believe we stored our data and ran our applications from our desktop computer, we were so primitive!!"