The Future Is … Cloudy

this is certainly one of the topics of the moment. Theres also a lot of confusion - i saw one reference today to "on-premise cloud computing" as distinct from the offsite variety - ???? Is he confused, or am I, isnt that an oxymoron?

Already there is debate over whether this is in fact the old "computer bureau" in new clothes, and enterprises have often wavered into and out of that model.

One thing is for sure , the technology isn't getting any simpler, and it must be getting harder to see genuine competitive advantage in having total control (and responsibility) for an organisation's ICT resources by keeping it in-house.

Viruses, hacking – when all these mix with personal devices in the workplace the stage is set for a complicated life for the CIO.

On the other hand, cloud computing offers a way to simplify things. If we consider that nearly all our computing power, multiple cpu cores and all, are going into running one program – a browser. Via the internet we can load programs that previously resided on our pc;  word processor, spreadsheet – I can do all that now with Google Docs and the like, via my browser.

So since the browser is really no more than a device to display web pages and send my typed responses to the web server, we are back to a modern analogue to centralised mainframe-driven terminals!

 Does this mean that the pc as we know it is dead?