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] had them; same with Yahoo [YHOO
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]. Research in Motion [RIMM
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] has suffered its fair (or unfair?) share too. But when Google's Gmail service went dark last night for about 90 minutes, cutting off millions of users from their email, it shone a bright light on the promise--and problems--of so-called Cloud Computing.
This is a big initiative by Google [GOOG
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], and so many others in technology nowadays: Hewlett-Packard [HPQ
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], Intel [INTC
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] and Yahoo recently announced a Cloud Computing push. Dell [DELL
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] is even trying to trademark the term "cloud computing," but even that's running into some jarring, regulatory bumps that might prevent the company from doing so.
For Google, Cloud Computing could be a big deal: the idea that all your information, personal data, digital entertainment, software applications, everything, is stored on a big network instead of, or maybe in addition to, the harddrive inside your own, personal computer. And then, of course, that (presumably) deeply protected and secure data would be accessible from any computer, anytime, anywhere. Very convenient.
Unless the network goes dark. I've written quite a bit about Cloud Computing, how it furthers the Sun Microsystems' [JAVA
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] co-founder Scott McNealy 1990s mantra of "the network is the computer." And if you believe all the big names mentioned previously, as well as Microsoft [MSFT
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], Oracle [ORCL
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], Salesforce.com [CRM
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], among so many others, that concept has finally arrived. Even Apple Inc.'s