Let the cloud computing wars begin

IBM has announced a new online service based on the popular Lotus Notes. The new service is called LotusLive iNotes, and the new service is aimed squarely at both Microsoft Exchange and Google's Apps Premier Edition. Regular readers know that I don't have much tolerance for the whole cloud computing buzz--it's a glorified mainframe, with less fault tolerance and much less data security. If I had to bet IBM's offering against Google, I'd go with IBM every time. Nobody knows how to do big, distributed computing better than IBM. Google is starting to get squeezed a bit, which is a good thing. I've been using Microsoft's Bing search engine for several weeks, and really like it--better results all around with far less dreck. And now IBM enters battle with Google. Good. Competition is great for everyone, especially buyers of services.

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