Some random thoughts about the article:
- There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the big data aggregators are doing data mining against potential competitors, markets, and individuals that they are specifically interested in, including the use of nominally non-public data that sits on their systems. The assumption that the aggregated non-public data will never be used against your own interests is not well-founded, any more than it is when discussing the same issue and governments.
- The use of MySQL is based in fanboi-ism, not rational technology selection. Google is as prone to this as any other tech organization. Unfortunately, MySQL has almost no redeeming qualities these days so I would not characterize it as a particularly wise choice. And hacking RDBMS to run on these types of distributed infrastructures has already been done many times; Google's contributions to MySQL seem to be centered on defect lash-ups and missing basics, not cloud computing.
- Cringely pretty conclusively demonstrates in the article that he has no idea what "cloud computing" actually is, what you can and cannot do with it, or why it is important. Messy transaction theoretic and latency issues do not magically disappear when Google implements yet another compute cloud.
- None of the various compute cloud technologies exploit the cross- sectional bandwidth or contextual statistics of the back-end, instead opting to use more of hosting model plus transparent process migration. This substantially weakens the value proposition, but it is also understandable since they are using data representation technology poorly suited for the task. The compute cloud won't be anything more than glorified hosting until someone addresses this issue, and whoever does will clean house because at that point "cloud computing" will offer broad new capabilities currently unavailable.
For now, cloud computing will have to compete with easy-to-use dedicated server environments since the argument is purely economic. If the argument becomes one of technological capability -- and it will soon -- then cloud computing will take over the world because you will not be able to compete without it.
As a roundabout introduction, I have a venture that has very advanced cloud computing technologies at its core and so this is a topic near and dear to my heart. :-)
Cheers, J. Andrew Rogers
