Why Netbooks Are the First Step Towards a Cloud Computing World

You may have heard the term "cloud computing" thrown around recently. It's a huge buzzword in IT departments, and a large number of tech journalists have casually added cloud computing into any story that isn't really newsworthy otherwise.

The thing that many people don't realize is that cloud computing is important. In fact, it might end up being the biggest technological development since the invention of the Internet. What's more, we don't even have to wait around for cloud computing to become a major force. It's already here, and if you have a netbook, you're probably already familiar with aspects of cloud computing without even realizing it.

For the uninitiated, a netbook is a small, underpowered laptop computer. They're typically very cheap. They're not big gaming PCs, and they usually can't do anything more than run a few small applications, send emails, and browse the Internet.

Why would anyone buy an underpowered computer? Well, power has simply become less important in recent years. Netbooks allow people to get their work done, and as I've already said, they're inexpensive. That makes them a great buy for business people and anyone at all who wants a simple, quick way to get online.

The kicker is that many new netbooks are cutting their resources even more. Some don't have hard drives. Some only have a very small amount of internal memory. That's because people can store things online, and netbooks are intended to facilitate that.

I'm writing this article on a Toshiba netbook and I'm on Google Documents right now, so everything that I type is automatically saved on one of Google's servers, probably hundreds of miles away from me. Later, I'll work on this same article from my home desktop computer without transferring any files or anything like that. It'll be the exact same experience, except my desktop computer cost $2000 and my laptop cost about $300.

This is the magic of cloud computing. Lower costs for access to the same resources.

Cloud computing tech is being developed that will allow computer users to share other resources. Already, companies are buying hosting services and server processing power from companies on the forefront of cloud computing tech, and soon, gamers will be able to play high-powered games on netbooks more underpowered than mine.

Cloud computing will change the way that we compute and what we pay for when we need computing power, and the lowly netbook is the first example of a brave--and inexpensive--new world.

How important do you think cloud computing will be for future technology? Post in our comments section below.