John Gage, one of the original employees of Sun Microsystems is credited with the phrase "The Network is the Computer". Those words are more true now than ever with the proliferation of virtualization technology and SaaS (Software as a Service) business models.
This morning I came across Google Base, an offering from Mountain View that I had not yet seen nor heard of. It's Google's answer to Amazon's SimpleDB, a hosted database solution which along with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is part of Amazon's Web Services platform - a massive cloud computing implementation.
The big difference is that Google Base builds in Google's searching and indexing capabilities, allowing rapid rollout of applications vs. SimpleDB which still requires a hefty bit of coding. Of course, as with all of Google's services, API's are provided to enable deep integration to custom applications if desired.
Both companies are playing a vital role in leveraging their massive datacenter infrastructures and providing access to these resources to individuals and software startups. In doing so, they are effectively reducing or even eliminating one of the biggest hurdles to innovation: cost.
I wonder if this was part of John Gage's vision a decade ago?
