Behind the Cloud

A big problem with investigating Cloud Computing is to figure out what Cloud Computing is. I think the definition points more to running your applications on server farms from a hosted provider. Microsoft has been making noise recently about “Cloud Computing” with their announcement that Amazon will offer Microsoft Server based applications in their Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). Aren’t these terms fun: Cloud is supposed to represent the Internet, but Elastic – Hmmm. Anyways, I’m not really looking at Cloud Computing as an Internet connectable computing power resource. I am really thinking Collaboration and that is probably why Google moves to the front.

Microsoft does offer a superior online application environment even though it has dependency upon a locally installed Office Suite. The classic MS Office environment is maintained but I am looking for the tie in with messaging and collaboration that Google tends to offer. I guess I’m looking for a way to allow my users to collaborate on academic endeavors or even business documents with some social networking flexibility and control.