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News.blog: Google moving towards cloud computing

Google has learned several lessons from the consumer market, Chandra said. "Simplicity wins. Not lowest-common denominator simplicity. Instead, you build a powerful, robust tool that is easy to use. That technology from the consumer space will translate into the enterprise."

Another trend, Chandra said, is the rise of the "power collaborator" within companies. "In the enterprise, things are still built for the power user. Software is built by experts for experts. Increasingly, people work in teams. We believe that you need to do a complete rethink to accommodate this new generation of employees. It shouldn't matter what OS people use, or in what geography they're located. Software is based on open standards. This is the vision of cloud computing and why we think this is the vision for the next generation of enterprise computing."

Also, the economics of enterprise computing are changing, Chandra said. Companies are being forced to deal with scalability to handle the increasing flood of content, video and photos. He cited Picasa, Google's photo site, which handles 7 million images per day. "There is a huge benefit that we can share with the market because of that," he said. Google's App Engine, basically a scalable hosting platform, offers "almost unlimited scalability. Honestly, we don't know where this is going. There are others like Amazon and Salesforce.com in this market. But the opportunity is huge," he said.

Finally, Chandra said the barriers to adoption of cloud computing by enterprises are beginning to fall away. In what might have been a competitive dig aimed at Amazon, which has experienced several outages in the past week, Chandra cited reliability as a major concern for businesses. "Reliability, with the notion that Web apps were based in a consumer world, it was expected that they were somewhat flaky. Now, Google cannot go down. Customers will leave us if that happens. We have invested in this," he said.