Hey, you, get onto my cloud.

• Author: Gearino, G.D.
• Position: FINE PRINT

I'm not a trendsetter, a declaration that will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the way 1 dress or noticed which music stations are programmed into my car radio. But I'm way ahead of the other kids on my block when it comes to cloud computing--a concept that deserves your attention. Geeks know all about it, of course, but for most folks it's still over the horizon.

Here's how I embraced the future: A few weeks ago, 1 settled on a new tactic for backup storage of large files, which in my case were the first 10 chapters of my next novel. It's every writer's nightmare to lose a work in progress, and I'm obsessive in this regard, keeping a printed copy of each chapter and also saving it to a CD. But recently I've gotten lazy, printing each chapter but not backing it up electronically. In a moment of fretfulness, I realized there was an easy way to store my files in a remote location--by e-mailing each chapter to myself as an attachment. A copy of my book now rests with Google. 1 can access it from anywhere in the world simply by logging onto my Gmail account. That's cloud computing: data storage and networking via servers (in my case, the Google server farm in Lenoir) on the Internet--which is depicted as a cloud in computer-network diagrams.

What you'll see in coming years is a tectonic shift as profound as the first computer revolution, which was when computing moved from mainframes onto the desks of ordinary people. This shift--call it Computing 2.0--will represent a flashback to the old days: It'll take your computing power, or at least the most vital parts of it, off your desk or lap and return it to huge, remote devices. You won't buy software anymore, because it'll be a service instead of a product. You won't worry about virus protection. You'll never download fixes or patches. External hard drives and other backup devices will go the way of the dial-up modem. Your boss will send you a document to review, and you'll do so from your cell phone at the golf course while pretending to be at your desk. You won't keep information exclusively on your computer because, like money in a jar buried in your yard, it'll do you no good there. In fact, that's how to look at it: Who keeps all his money at home nowadays? After all, it's networked, too, parked in a financial cloud and accessible to you anywhere anytime.

That shift to ubernetworking will affect virtually every technology company. That's not my prediction alone. It also comes from...