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It’s a power in the cloud super weekend!

First the BusinessWeek cover story yesterday. Then the NYT today, in a report on MS vs. Google by By Steve Lohr and Miguel Helft.

It includes this gem from Eric Schmidt, when asked if Google thinks 90 percent of computing will eventually reside in the cloud:

“In our view, yes,” [CEO Eric] Schmidt says. “It’s a 90-10 thing.” Inside the cloud resides “almost everything you do in a company, almost everything a knowledge worker does.”

As Dave Girouard, the general manager of Google’s enterprise business, says: “If you’re creating a complex document like an annual report, you want Word, and if you’re making a sophisticated financial model, you want Excel. That’s what the Microsoft products are great at. But less and less work is like that.”

The stark contrast between MS and Google

The NYT article on MS vs. Google contains 2 seemingly unrelated parts that illustrate the stark difference between MS and Google.

Mr. Raikes (from Microsoft) notes that Microsoft has spent years and billions of dollars in product development and customer research, studying in minute detail how individual workers and companies use software.

Later in the article, the authors relate the story of how some cellphone software a Googler developed was released just 6 weeks after the idea was born. No formal product reviews or formal approval processes.

Different worlds.

UPDATE. A great follow-up on this: Microsoft in Denial: Google threat is classic disruption

There are other related posts like this by Guy Creese. This post displays the fairly common lack of understanding that Google Apps is NOT simply a MS Office replacement - it is much more disruptive than that. And I think Guy’s comment that the adoption of cloud computing will follow the same curve as electricity is just silly, as if the pace of change hasn’t changed in a hundred years. Yes, it may take a while for companies in the USA that already have huge infrastructures in place to make the change - but the real growth will be in places like China and India, where there are a lot fewer legacy data centers and related bureaucracy to deal with, and where adopting cloud computing out the gate is a n o-brainer.