zafile - 8:06 pm on Dec 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

Cloud computing is a term that's being overhyped and zealots have portrayed Google as the main player in the technology.

I remember a Jim Allchin presentation at NetWorld + InterOp in September 1995. While introducing the Gibraltar server (later named IIS), Allchin said:

"On the server side, we're focused on building an extensible platform for server applications on the Internet, so it's not just a publishing system or gopher system, it's really a platform for writing applications."

See part of Allchin's presentation at ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-docs/video-clips/

So the idea of delivering applications over the Internet doesn't come from the guys at Google.

Nevertherless, as incrediBILL mentioned, quality of service is a must to deliver applications over the Internet.

Bill Gates said in his Internet Strategy Workshop Keynote from December 1995:

"There's a need for so-called quality of service. This is a term of art that you'll hear quite a bit. This is the idea that, if you want to communicate on the Internet between two points and you want to send real-time data like video and audio, you need to be able to clear in advance bandwidth reservations so you know that that conversation or that video will be delivered.

"Now, there are many techniques or hacks for delivering video and audio without quality of service. You basically get enough buffer on the other side that you hope the lack of predictability in bandwidth won't cause an interruption, because if you have somebody listening to the audio or watching the video, an interruption is very distracting.

"It's only when you get quality of service guarantees that you know the movie won't be interrupted, the audio won't be interrupted, and then you can get something that's a superset of telephony. It's very worthwhile to continue to take today's packet-oriented structure and come up with tricky ways to get as much out of it as we can, but fundamentally, we have to have quality of service guarantees in order to convince corporations to completely drop all the line leasing and special networks that they've built up."

While we have affordable broadband connections via cable in Costa Rica, 56kbps is still the main connection to the Internet in most homes in the country.

And broadband across the US? See [news.com...] and [nielsen-netratings.com...]

Hence, expect to see Microsoft Office applications in hard disks for quite a few more years. When the time comes and broadband is the main connection to the Internet, be sure Microsoft will be ready to deliver Microsoft Office over the Internet.