The only real advantage that I can see is that cloud computing makes it possible to scale quickly on demand without the associated capital expenditure for 'stuff', you just pay for usage.
That's got a downside too, at the moment you reach a steady state it is probably cheaper again to buy the actual hardware and colocate instead of using cloud services (which after all exist to make money for their owners).
If you look at the Platform as a Service space, a lot of development work is done automatically. For example, upload a spreadsheet and the data persistence layer is inferred from the data itself, no need to manually create the tables, the pojos, etc. Just drag and drop.
On top of that, all the security is built in. Email notifications, built in. All this in addition to the scalability of the cloud infrastructure. No need to build in clustering, failover, etc -- all handled automagically.
You caught OpenMIKE red-handed. Quick, let's all downmod him to -31337!
Edit: in case it wasn't clear, the purpose of this comment was to block the impending group-downmod of OpenMIKE. He was already at -1 when I posted this. That already happened once today to a brand-new member of HN (rambo), so I'm rather passionate about preventing that kind of behavior.
Let's downmod you instead, for trying to be a wannabe mod. An incorrect comment should be at -1. If it gets lower than that, well that's a shame, but from what I've seen it's more common for it to stay at -1.
Or you could just re-read the comment immediately after his, and realize that OpenMIKE added to the discussion and contributed to the community, bettering it.
I'm wondering why they seem to have gone relatively light on the Honda FCX, but denigrated the Telsa with what looked to be willful misrepresentations (the whole '13-hour charge' thing)?
I've been thinking about this lately - about giving all of your data to a third party and hoping they don't go out of business or erase your account (for whatever reason).
Issues of software freedom aside, I think the key to making people trust the cloud is to make the data contained in the services more transitive. Essentially, creating a standard Import/Export for the web. i.e. - If I decide to switch to vimeo for my web video needs, I'd like to be able to import all of my videos from youtube without much fuss (or make a local backup). That's not a great example, but it's the general idea.
Hmmm...after I think about it, this pretty much boils down to: "let me get at my data in a format that I can read."
I've been thinking about this lately - about giving all of your data to a third party and hoping they don't go out of business or erase your account (for whatever reason).
Or be forced to give up access statistics via Pen Register.
Or provide governments the ability to access your data via CALEA compliance hardware/processes.
I value the privacy of my data as much as I value the integrity of it. I don't see myself doing much cloud computing in the near future.
What's wrong with having the company charge you (and all users) enough to make their service profitable, and having a contract between you that they wont erase your data without sending you a copy first?
Keeping your personal data on a free account might be a bit of a crapshoot, but keeping your company data on a paid for service account shouldn't be.
Nothing wrong with that at all - that actually sounds really reasonable. Is anybody doing this? I'm getting to the point where I'd pay for most of the stuff that I'm getting for free now - if I had some sort of contract that would give me some recourse in case things go awry.
I've thought some about what it would take to set up a system for failed startups so that customers could be assured that their data / services don't disappear when a company goes bust -- something similar to the Free Qt Foundation that KDE has setup with Trolltech:
Here at salesforce.com (the company that does cloud computing/saas for businesses,) we have the data loader tool that customers can use to download all of their data locally as often as they wish. Also, there is an API so people can write their own backup/restore/integration code.
Hmmm...after I think about it, this pretty much boils down to: "let me get at my data in a format that I can read."
Basically what you're talking about is standards - but I think the SaaS/Cloud space is too immature to be able to define standards at this stage... In fact, whilst it would give consumers extra security, it would very likely slow down innovation.
Interestingly it seems to be based on a referrer. It worked when I clicked the link from Google, not when I clicked it from here. Why are these clowns still in Google's index anyways, cloaking isn't allowed.
Just curious: what exactly do you mean by this? i.e. - how does cloud computing help with web app development?