Boy there’s been a lot of talk about cloud computing lately. Personally, I’m not buying it quite yet. Read on.

Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Big Switch, is all about how computing is following in the footsteps of electricity and is becoming a distributed commodity rather than a local amenity.

Carr points out that two centuries ago in the U.S., factories, like the Burden IronWorks he showcases, had their own sources of power. In Burden’s case, it was a large iron water wheel that, during the mid 1800s powered the belts, bellows and pulleys that produced horseshoes and other forged parts the factory churned out.

Then came a national electricity grid and, by the early 20th century, Burden’s water wheel was gathering weed and rust.

The parallel for computing is the move from applications and data sitting on our home and office computers and moving to the Internet, or the “cloud” as IT humans like to call it (often drawing it on whiteboards as a billowy cluster of cartoon curves). Cloud computing has been with us a long time. When you first did searches on Google back in 1998 you were using cloud computing. Seaching Google requires little of your local computer. It just sends a short text search term through the Internet (into the cloud) to Google’s massive computers that search, collate, spindle and fold the results and send them back to your box. All your computer has to do then is show you a linked page of results. Great for your machine: inside work, no heavy lifting. You could search the world’s knowledge using a Commodore VIC 20, for God’s sake.

Since the late 90s, cloud computing has become more complex and ubiquitous. Google now lets you work on spreadsheets and Word-like documents using their distributed horsepower via Google Docs. But other online services take the concept even further. Picnik for example, allows you to do basic photo editing and manipulation online. It’s like a cloud version of the Adobe’s Photoshop. Picnik is now baked right into the DNA of the photosharing site Flickr. So, using Flickr, you can not only share your photos but make use of powerful photo editing software even if the computer you’re using doesn’t have the photo manipulation software, or the horsepower to run it.

Speaking of Adobe, using the web-based Remixer, you can edit, manipulate and add text to your YouTube videos. Again, you don’t need a machine with video editing software on it. It’s all done via Flash, in your browser, in the cloud.

A final example: mogulus.com has actually created a cloud-based television studio. It’s the tool we’ll be using for rabbletv and it gives you the ability to mix, caption and broadcast video from multiple webcams in real time – all via cloud computing.

Of course, there are a host of small, mobile devices that are taking advantage of cloud computing. Why store all the knowledge of Wikipedia on a cellphone, when the cellphone can tap into that intelligence in the cloud? Why put a word processor on a Nokia N810 Internet tablet, when you can use Google Docs?

For that matter, why buy Microsoft Office or a computer powerful enough to run it, when you can use a tiny, cheap Asus eee PC or Everex Cloudbook and get to work for under $400? Why buy a laptop when you can check email, facebook, flickr, twitter and do word processing on an iPod Touch? This is certainly true in developing countries which are growing a wireless infrastructure and can make good use of cheap, cloud-based devices like the XO laptop from the OLPC project I’ve discussed in a previous column.

So, it would seem cloud computing is upon us. But, maybe not. Over the past few months I’ve used all the devices above and have had my head in the cloud big time. Some experiences have been great. I love using Picnik on flickr. It’s a handy way to adjust colours and exposure for presentation online. But, I still use Aperture and Photoshop on my Macbook Pro. I use Google Docs to share work with others, but I still use Pages to do most of my writing (including this column, although I wrote the first one on my iPod Touch).

I’ve used Remixer, but wouldn’t give up iMovie 08 on my laptop. Why? The same reason folks don’t abandon their SUVs for public transit. Yes, it costs more and is often overkill, but it’s quick, there when I need it, and gives me the same sense of false security you get from surrounding yourself in a ten ton pseudo-truck with a rhino bumper when you’re stuck in traffic at Bloor and Bay.

Plus, to extend the car analogy, it’s because the roads to the clouds are often still dirt paths, if they exist at all. An Asus eeePC using Google Docs wirelessly is a doorstop if there is no Wifi. An iPod without a wireless signal is just another music player. And, even on wired connections, signals fade, drop and disappoint.

So, while I believe we can look forward to a day when our devices pull their power from the cloud the way a tree pulls energy from the sun, we aren’t there yet. It’s going to be a few more years before true cloud computing is anything more than castles in the air.

Until then, you’ll have to pry my laptop from my cold RSI-riddled hands.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...