Cloud Computing: The Hard Drive's "Air" Apparent?

We got hit with another snow storm here in Cincinnati yesterday (and continuing today). While I was able to make it into work after slip-sliding up the highway, it got so bad that all of us at DotLoop had to leave around noon.

As I posted before, snow days are by no means non-work days, and I had plenty to do by the time I got home.

This presented a bit of a conundrum, however, as I am a Mac guy and I didn't have the Microsoft Word program needed to finish the report.

Luckily for me, we live in the Age of Google and I was able to use Google Docs to not only type up the report, but save it as a Microsoft Word file and e-mail it to everyone who needed it. This was the first time I had used Google Docs to create a new file and not just read a file. I was more than impressed - here I was saving a Word Document to my desktop without even having the program on my computer. I was experiencing first-hand the future of computing: doing everything you need to do all from a web browser.

Head in the Clouds

Cloud computing - that is, work done straight from the web as opposed to a hard drive - is by no means brand new; the term dates back to the 1990s. It wasn't until 2007 that Google and I.B.M. began work on a large-scale cloud computing research project. That may not seem too long ago, but considering that the iPhone didn't come around until the same year, 2007 was eons ago in tech time. And now, "apps" are so ingrained in our collective consciousness that it seems silly to think of a time before smart phones were ubiquitous.

Indeed, by 2013, we may be discussing how silly it was for us to think of anything but cloud computing. The iPad may or may not be a huge hit like its iPhone cousin was three years ago, but it may change the way we use our computers, much like we changed the way we use our phones.

A Hard Drive-Free OS?

Of course, it may be Google who ends up dominating the hard-drive-less computing arena. Late last year, Google announced it has created its very own web-based operating system (OS), Google Chrome OS. Google will partner with computer makers whose netbooks "will not have traditional hard disk drives -- they will rely on non-volatile flash memory and Internet-based storage for saving all of your data."

You can do almost anything from a web-browser - when's the last time you inserted a CD-ROM to download software? Heck, even software that isn't used in a web browser is still able to be installed through a web browser.

The Future Is Simple

All of this new of web-based computing talk only makes me smile, of course, because that's exactly what DotLoop is doing. With DotLoop, real estate agents can go to one website domain and handle all of their offers, contracts, and contacts from their web-browser, without ever having to download anything onto their computer. Their office - including all the forms they'll ever need - is anywhere there is an internet connection.

It's funny: we used to think about the future of computers and imagined how they would look and function. But it appears we were looking at the wrong thing; we should have been looking at the future of information.

dotloop.com