Many people have asked me to explain cloud computing in layman terms. And as I begin drawing a picture for them, I inevitably find myself first tracing the path of the evolution of computing in general. Partly because, this helps them find a common ground to begin with, but also because it’s crucial to understand the past before you can fully appreciate the present and imagine the future.

The views presented in this article are not attributable to my company and do not represent an official position.

So, let the story begin:

Once upon a time, which was a long time ago, there were no computers in the Kingdom of Earth. The common folks, or “aam aadmi” as we know them today, used age-old techniques invented by ancient Chinese to document almost everything. Using a good old pen and paper, they would write post cards, create accounting journals, draw advertising campaigns, store contacts in a phone book (no, a real paper phone book). They listened to songs using a tape recorder. When the necessity arose to type, they used a typewriter; and eventually graduated to using the hardbound version of the yellow pages to find a neighborhood plumber. Photos used to be shared using a photo-album after putting much thought in to picking the cover since it was not easy to “check” and “uncheck” them. 

However, behind the scenes, the International Business Machine, a growing company dealing in high-end research for the government and other large corporations developed The Mainframe. This was a machine, sometimes as large as a room, which was used to perform complex tasks. I remember when my professor introduced me to a microprocessor during my electronics class. It took me a while to programmatically arrive at the value of two multiplications, which for an average kid was a simple mental math exercise. But, pretty soon we would understand the potential of such building blocks. 

As things shaped up, somewhere in Redmond, a Harvard dropout wrote a basic language for the common man and built the personal computer (PC), thereby unleashing the potential of these technologies for the greater good of the human race. This was the second milestone, after the mainframe. And soon enough businesses capitalized on the PC by connecting multiple machines to a central hub. As the client-server architecture took shape and companies mirrored the assembly line concept in all departments, Enterprise Relationship Planning (ERP) software became the new standard for running your business. Companies like SAP and Oracle took lead in automating best practices in a software package and the productivity rose by leaps and bounds. Indian software vendors like Tata, Infosys and Wipro started emerging as more skilled manpower was required to deploy, upgrade and support these software systems.

However, these systems were not without their flaws. They were time consuming to deploy, painful to maintain and took a ton of money to support. End users would find themselves playing chinese-whispers with the developers as the end product took considerable cycles before materializing, and apparently, looked pretty different from the initial requirements. 

Around that time, an executive at Oracle left the company to start the new way of building CRM solutions – the On-Demand way. Companies like Amazon and Google had used the power of the Internet (or “Cloud”) to do business or democratize tools like e-mail and other apps. Now, Salesforce was taking this concept and extending enterprise solutions to the cloud. It met a lot of resistance early on as people were concerned about security and privacy of their data; however, these and other concerns would be addressed soon. The benefits of cloud computing would convince the world to adopt it faster than ever. In parallel, social networking would connect five hundred million people. Today, people are still finding ways to make these new concepts more cohesive. Cloud computing is no longer just CRM on the cloud. Social CRM and online-gaming are making big waves as well. However, more about Cloud Computing and what makes it so good in the next article. For now, this is where we stop.