Introducing Cloud 9 Computing

Yet there are questions about cloud computing today. Greg Ness, for example, in his blog on Seeking Alpha points at many, and Ellison does raise an important point: What's really new about everything we see and hear about cloud computing today?

Maybe Nick Carr has the answer. Carr believes that technology is irrelevant!  Well, isn't that what cloud computing is all about? In an earlier century we moved on from producing our own electricity, individually, to building distribution networks and compatible electric engines, to having electricity available to everyone, all the time and everywhere, for use with any appliance. Updated translation: Cloud computing is the logical next step in growing the technology market by at least one order of magnitude (and probably by a great deal more).

Yet, in the ongoing quest to win the data center war, we are all focused on what needs to be done inside the cloud, or the data center, and continue to work on improving the power generator, to make it more powerful, effective, efficient and reliable. That's good. In fact, it is very good. But who is going to use all this power, and how, if everything we can make available in a given cloud still requires its own dedicated, complex, insecure, expensive, power-hungry distribution infrastructure?  And what if this distribution infrastructure can only deliver a segregated, limited, browser-based experience for each application?  Is Ellison telling us we should stop drinking our Kool Aid for a moment and not insist on rebranding mere Web applications as "cloud computing?" If so, we tend to agree with him. And maybe his well-known, albeit failed, attempt to bring about the network computer of a few years ago  as a sign of what's coming, and of what can finally be delivered in full today.

Was his attempt ahead of its time? Absolutely. Was it on the wrong path? No. We think Carr is right, and for the computing industry to move to the next stage technology must become irrelevant. All the PCs, PDAs, fancy phones and other complex devices we are familiar with today will have to disappear into the cloud, and become usable there, along with all of their content, applications and services, without a computer, via a multitude of very cool, very inexpensive, "dumb" devices that plug and play into any network connection and act as the human interface to any computer, application or "cloud service" that sits out there. On demand and on the fly. No technology knowledge involved. Affordable and usable by everyone on earth.

The network is (finally) the computer, and with mobile broadband connectivity now pervasively available even in emerging markets, sometimes with even more coverage than electric power (!), we believe the time for the "big switch" has arrived.

All of which makes for a very interesting market opportunity for everyone in the technology and telecommunications industries. A game-changing opportunity that will bring masses of new users, developers, applications, devices and services to a market that wants and now deserves to obtain one thing: SIMPLICITY. A market opportunity that is, in our opinion, virtually unlimited in size and potential.

We call this Cloud 9 Computing. And we are launching this blog in order to share our thoughts and test our beliefs with all of you out there who are convinced, as we are, that the massive advances being achieved by Microsoft, Google, EMC, Cisco, VMware and the rest of the technology industry -- to cloud-enable the data center and Web-enable applications -- will provide a much, much bigger payload if they can become usable, simply and safely, by everyone, everywhere, on the fly and on demand, without ever having to buy, configure, constantly maintain and, yes, lug around a computer.