Bill Gates: Bullish on cloud storage

Bill Gates has his own view of the technology trend. The founder of Microsoft, which has been leading the company for the past 30 years, has been playing the role of introducing and promoting new technologies to the corporate and consumer markets. He thinks online storage services, or cloud computing, are about to pop.

Gates has retired from the post of chief Software Architect, who no longer participates in the company's work every day, but spends more time on his foundation. But he still has a very deep and unique insight into the development trend of technology. PC Magazine recently published a lengthy feature article, "Exit Interview," in which Gates talked about many topics--including cloud computing and storage.

Gates argues that the main problem has always been: "Where does the calculation happen?" By your side or in a faraway place? "After discussing the evolution from time-sharing to desktop computing to Internet computing," he says, "Now we can take advantage of the benefits of the two worlds, and if you call a subroutine, this subroutine may be on another machine on the internet, and as a user, You feel like you're using a local subroutine. ”

Gates describes the difference between cloud computing and cloud storage. "People always confuse. Cloud storage is where your files are stored elsewhere and backed up, which is different from cloud computing. Both are great, and they are good techniques. ”

"The effectiveness of cloud computing is not discounted, so rational storage managers will consider using cloud storage technology," he said. ”

Instead, he says there are problems with cloud computing, and latency and bandwidth can affect performance. But he believes businesses will put a portion of the data center in the cloud.

Gates seems to believe that cloud storage will be promoted faster than cloud computing, because he says cloud storage is not affected by other factors.

It is rumored that Microsoft is developing a cloud-based Windows platform called the "Red Dog" that will compete with Google and Amazon's cloud computing projects. Red dogs can be seen as a product of Microsoft's Elastic Cloud Computing service--EC2 and Google App engine against Amazon.

Microsoft also offers Windows Live SkyDrive online storage services for the consumer market.

When asked what he thought was his greatest success, Gates replied, "The most important thing is to create the software industry and create a platform where everyone can write something on this platform, which is very important ... There is no software industry until the PC appears. ”