Computing heads for the clouds

"As computing moves online, the sources of power and money will increasingly be enormous 'computing clouds."

"The PC age is giving way to a new era: the utility age."

the traditional PC is replaced by a simple terminal:

-- a 'thin client' that's little more than a monitor hooked up to the Internet. --

Think back a few years -- anytime you wanted to type a letter, create a spreadsheet, edit a photo, or play a game, you had to go to the store, buy the software, and install it on your computer.

But nowadays, if you want to look up restaurants on Google... find directions on MapQuest... watch a video on YouTube... or sell furniture on Craigslist... all you need is a computer with an Internet connection.

Although these activities require you to use your PC, none of the content you are accessing or the applications you are running are actually stored on your computer -- instead they're stored at a giant data center somewhere in the "cloud."

And you don't give any of it a second thought... just like you don't think twice about where the electricity is coming from when you plug an appliance into the wall.

But cloud computing isn't going to be just a modern convenience -- it's going to be an enormous industry.

So the end of the home or busseniss PC is near. And Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, has even written an entire book on the subject, entitled The Big Switch. In it, he asserts: "The PC age is giving way to a new era: the utility age."