Living in the Cloud
Consumers are increasingly using web applications across the Internet. Google is the leader of this trend, with email, word processing, spreadsheet, and calendar functionality. Data is not stored locally, on each computer, but in large "server farms" operated by Google. What are the implications of this transition? Nicholas Carr makes an analogy to the development of the electrical grid 100 years ago.
Cheap, plentiful electricity changed society and culture, spurring the rise of mass media, mass consumerism and modern advertising. We can expect that cheap, plentiful computing will have similarly far-reaching consequences, once again overturning many of our assumptions about how we work and live.
