The Cloud begins to take shape

Here are a pair of reports that help make it clearer what is emerging in the Internet cloud:

* Microsoft. MS will offer Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications, Office Live Meeting, and Dynamics CRM. Price, according to this report, is $15 per seat per month. Let's imagine that Dartmouth outsources its students into the MS cloud. That's $180 per student per year (12 months at $15), or $738K per year. If students could be satisfied with the "diskless" option ($3 per month), then the cost drops to $150K per year.

* InfoWorld has a post that describes "early experiments in cloud computing." This post describes Nasdaq and the New York Times using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). Example from the post: "The Times processed 4TB of data through EC2 and S3, using a credit card to get the service going in a matter of minutes so that it could convert scans of 15 million news stories into PDFs for online distribution." Hmm.

and: "The Times didn't coordinate the job with Amazon — someone in IT just signed up for the service on the Web using a credit card, then began uploading the data."

wow.

Comments

[Barbara Knauff]

"The Times didn't coordinate the job with Amazon — someone in IT just signed up for the service on the Web using a credit card, then began uploading the data."!!!

Wow indeed... let me see... where is my purchasing card? got it... later...!

[Joshua Kim]

There is nothing in the Microsoft Cloud offering that I want, or that I think our community needs. Seems to me that MS is trying to graft a cloud strategy on a core business OS/Office business...where the future is RIA's and browser based apps (sure...synched locally for back-up) - with both the OS and the platform (laptop, tablet, phone, etc.) becoming fungible.

The other day my computer died on an upgrade from Tiger to Leopard - but since I live in the cloud anyway (and from our perspective it does not matter where the servers live - behind or outside the gateway) I did not loose docs or productivity.

I've said it before, but if I was Microsoft I'd buy EEEPC and work to make Windows and associated cloud services relevant once again...basically giving away the machine and making the dollars by renting out the services. I'd do MS cloud services (and pay for them) if they came with a free little laptop that was tightly built around MS tech.