In his new book "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google," computer industry writer and former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review Nicholas G. Carr discusses the changes he sees in the future of computing. One of the more dramatic changes is a shift to cloud computing -- where applications and files are stored on a large, centralized supercomputer or network. The end user accesses his or her files using computers that are more streamlined but less sophisticated than today's typical machines.

On October 17, 2007, Carr took the idea a step further in a posting on his Rough Type blog. He called out two hot technology companies, Google and Apple, and said they were on the verge of a partnership in which Apple would make an inexpensive piece of hardware users could carry around. This would leverage the computing power of the vast data centers Google has been building to hold the applications and the data for millions of users.

The idea of cloud computing certainly isn't new. Oracle's Larry Ellison launched the New Internet Computer (NIC) company in 2000 to lead the industry forward to that goal. The concept is very simple: On your desk, you would have a very low-cost computer with just a processor, a keyboard and a monitor. There would be no hard drive or CD/DVD drive. It would be hooked up to the Internet and would link to a central supercomputer, which would host all of your programs and files. The idea, however, was ahead of its time. The NIC sold very poorly, probably due to a dearth of broadband availability in the United States. The company folded in 2003.


A googol is the name for a one followed by 100 zeros. Google's name comes from its founders' desire to keep track of the vast amounts of information on the Internet . As the company grew, it began offering more services than just Web searches. Through in-house innovations and acquisitions of other companies, Google created what is now Google Docs, a Web-based suite of applications that includes word processing, a spreadsheet and a presentation program. With Gmail, that puts Google in direct competition with Microsoft for the corporate desktop. And unlike Office, Google Docs is completely free.

These hosted services are the kinds of applications that would be at the core of a cloud computer, just one reason it would be feasible for Google to be the perfect back-end for a hardware manufacturer to partner with. Google's machine, really a network of machines, offers amazing computing power. It also offers redundancy. Google already stores multiple backups of its information on its equipment, and if one part of one machine breaks, it can be swapped out without any loss of information [source: Baker]. Using a cloud computer stored on Google's massive infrastructure would free you from having to take your files with you -- no thumb drives, laptop hard drives, CDs, DVDs or other removable media. You could work on your projects from home, from work and on your mobile computer while on the go.

With a cloud computer, you probably wouldn't have to pay for software. Using applications hosted on the server, your local machine would have all the software it needs to work without having to store it locally. You wouldn't have to update your software to the next version -- and everyone would use the same software on the cloud. There should be no compatibility issues.

In 2006, Google built two giant computing centers in The Dalles, Ore. Each is the size of a football field and needs massive amounts of cooling for the computers inside.

One of the biggest problems involved with creating a cloud computer is the amount of electricity required to make it work. Google built its data center in The Dalles, Ore., because of the high-speed Internet access powered by fiber optic lines and the nearby The Dalles Dam. Google needs large amounts of electricity to power the cooling equipment necessary to keep thousands of servers running. In fact, the two football-field-sized buildings each have two cooling plants four stories tall [source: Markoff and Hansell].

If Google can't handle the processing power needed to offer the world a computing cloud, it certainly is well on its way to building it. But why would Google partner with Apple for the end-user hardware? Read on for Carr's best guesses and what his critics say.

With the success of the iPhone, Apple became the darling of the wireless phone industry. Carr believes Apple could apply its design skills to create a popular, inexpensive cloud computing device.

According to Carr, Apple doesn't have the kind of supercomputing power that would be required to drive the back end of the partnership. There aren't many organizations that do. Only Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon have the ability, says Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of research at Yahoo. Google and Apple have had a partnership dating back years. If Microsoft succeeds in its bid to acquire Yahoo announced Feb. 1, 2008, the combined companies may well be able to leverage a sophisticated cloud-computing environment.

If Google and Apple do team up for this sort of partnership, here's what Carr feels their cloud computer would be like:

    * Inexpensive: The machine you'd buy would be under $200 and there would be no charge for applications or data transfer.
    * Green: With a low-power chip and flash memory, an Apple thin client -- a network computer -- would have no power-hungry optical drive or hard drive.
    * Easy to maintain: No optical drive or hard drive also means fewer moving parts, which means it would probably live a longer life.
    * Easy to update: You wouldn't have to worry about updating your software, that would all be taken care of for you. You could just use your machine until it simply wore out

(Contributed by Dr. Dagnawi Tewolde)