Cloud Computing

Background Briefing, on ABC Radio National on 14 September 2008, looked at cloud computing - the good, the not so good, and the ugly.
Stan Correy describes cloud computing as "taking the information off your laptop, off your desktop computer, out of your office, out of your home or apartment and putting it into giant data centres owned by Google and others."
So what's good about it? Well, it means that using the internet will be much simpler, as the applications and other programmes that you use do do whatever you do will be hosted somewhere out there and you won't have to worry about set up - just click and go. Furthermore, in theory big companies can get rid of their IT departments as all the work is done somewhere out there.
The ugly side is loss of privacy.
The bad is that the end user has no control over whether or not an application that's vital to what they do will continue to be available (see Kerry Webb's item about the disappearing Google Page Creator in the October 2008 issue of InCite.
The issue of cloud computing has come to the fore recently with the launch of Google's browser, Chrome, designed to make online life simpler and faster.