Cloudware is the New New in Computing

George Gilder is a big thinker, he wrote a very long piece in the recent issue of Wired about Cloudware, or the use of remote datacenters, instead of desktops, on which to store data and where software is net-based instead of on hard drives.

We get a glimpse of massive data centers that Google , Yahoo, Ask.com and Microsoft are building on the west coast. These  outsized facilities,  an arrangement of hundreds of thousands of servers, stacked in row upon row, suck "ceaseless cycles" of power and generate more heat than anyone can imagine.  Google's facility is located on the site of a former aluminum smelting plant, near a huge hydro electric dam, which produces power for a fifth the cost of the San Francisco area.
It's a plan that Google has been hatching since before they went public, to have a worldwide network of these behemoth server centers to store all of the data that comes through their sites. 

There have been rumors that Google is involved with the CIA. After all, they are the largest repository of accessible data anyone has ever seen.  There are so many things the spooks could do with the data.

Gilder interviews the head of Ask. com's datacenters, who estimates that the five leading search engines use about 5 gigawats of power among them in 2006.  That's about as much juice as is used by the entire city of Las Vegas on the hottest day of the year.

He said the Verizon center, located outside NYC in the Jersey suburbs, will be obsolete soon because of their power needs. They will be moving west to one of the places closer to the cheapest power available.