Cover Story December 13, 2007, 5:00PM EST

Google and the Wisdom of Clouds

(page 2 of 5)

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Lazowska calls the University of Washington's Google cloud "a gift from heaven"
Brian Smale

ONE-WAY STREET

For small companies and entrepreneurs, clouds mean opportunity—a leveling of the playing field in the most data-intensive forms of computing. To date, only a select group of cloud-wielding Internet giants has had the resources to scoop up huge masses of information and build businesses upon it. Our words, pictures, clicks, and searches are the raw material for this industry. But it has been largely a one-way street. Humanity emits the data, and a handful of companies—the likes of Google, Yahoo! (YHOO), or Amazon.com (AMZN)—transform the info into insights, services, and, ultimately, revenue.

This status quo is already starting to change. In the past year, Amazon has opened up its own networks of computers to paying customers, initiating new players, large and small, to cloud computing. Some users simply park their massive databases with Amazon. Others use Amazon's computers to mine data or create Web services. In November, Yahoo opened up a cluster of computers—a small cloud—for researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. And Microsoft (MSFT) has deepened its ties to communities of scientific researchers by providing them access to its own server farms. As these clouds grow, says Frank Gens, senior analyst at market research firm IDC, "A whole new community of Web startups will have access to these machines. It's like they're planting Google seeds." Many such startups will emerge in science and medicine, as data-crunching laboratories searching for new materials and drugs set up shop in the clouds.

For clouds to reach their potential, they should be nearly as easy to program and navigate as the Web. This, say analysts, should open up growing markets for cloud search and software tools—a natural business for Google and its competitors. Schmidt won't say how much of its own capacity Google will offer to outsiders, or under what conditions or at what prices. "Typically, we like to start with free," he says, adding that power users "should probably bear some of the costs." And how big will these clouds grow? "There's no limit," Schmidt says. As this strategy unfolds, more people are starting to see that Google is poised to become a dominant force in the next stage of computing. "Google aspires to be a large portion of the cloud, or a cloud that you would interact with every day," the CEO says. The business plan? For now, Google remains rooted in its core business, which gushes with advertising revenue. The cloud initiative is barely a blip in terms of investment. It hovers in the distance, large and hazy and still hard to piece together, but bristling with possibilities.

Changing the nature of computing and scientific research wasn't at the top of Bisciglia's agenda the day he collared Schmidt. What he really wanted, he says, was to go back to school. Unlike many of his colleagues at Google, a place teeming with PhDs, Bisciglia was snatched up by the company as soon as he graduated from the University of Washington, or U-Dub, as nearly everyone calls it. He'd never been a grad student. He ached for a break from his daily routines at Google—the 10-hour workdays building search algorithms in his cube in Building 44, the long commutes on Google buses from the apartment he shared with three roomies in San Francisco's Duboce Triangle. He wanted to return to Seattle, if only for one day a week, and work with his professor and mentor, Ed Lazowska. "I had an itch to teach," he says.

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