William F. Garrity

Michael Fitzgerald in the June 25, 2008, The New York Times writes about "cloud computing:" 

May 25, 2008

Prototype

Cloud Computing: So You Don’t Have to Stand Still

By MICHAEL FITZGERALD

CLOUD computing is the jargon of the moment in the technology industry. Google, I.B.M., Microsoft and Yahoo are just some of the big companies talking up the cloud, and a bunch of smaller ones are, too.

What, you may be thinking, is cloud computing? Basically, it means obtaining computing resources — processing, storage, messaging, databases and so on — from someplace outside your own four walls, and paying only for what you use.

It’s a mushy term that is being applied loosely to many things on the Web. Salesforce.com is now called a cloud application — after all, companies let it store their sales data, rather than running it on their own systems. Facebook, too, is a cloud platform, because software developers write applications for it and distribute them on it.

Then there’s the infrastructure cloud, where companies offer up their servers, storage and other technology to anyone who can pay. Previously, that was called grid or utility computing, because you tap into it as you need it, as you would with the power grid, and pay only for what you use. In the early days of computing, it was called time-sharing.