Cloud-Computing vs Apps

With the introduction of Google Wave, following Google Docs and the Google Apps suite of productivity and collaborative working tools released over the last year, the release of Google Chrome is truly one of the most serious ventures in challenging Microsoft’s dominance of the way 90% of the population use their computers.

In my mind the change had already begun to shift with the advent of nicely-termed ‘cloud computing’ online applications that have already been around for a while. With cloud services such as Flickr to store and share your pictures, YouTube to some extent with video (although I personally prefer the higher-quality of Vimeo) through to WordPress-style Blogs, Delicious bookmarking and the recent prevalence of online streaming music services such as Spotify … there’s not much need to keep your content on your computer anymore. A friend of mine recently upgraded his MacBook and found that he had around 200Mb of personal data (excluding apps and settings) – the rest was distributed.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/19/googles-chrome-os-revealed/