With all the hype about cloud computing, it???s easy to label it as the latest fad, especially when everyone whose application talks Internet is trying to rebrand themselves as a cloud. But the long view shows that this really is an important change, one of several major shifts in computing that have taken place over the last 40 years, each of them driven by costs and shortages.

Once upon a time, computing was expensive. As a result, programmers carried their stacks of punched cards into basements late at night, and ran them on the mainframe. The CPU was always busy; humans were cheap.

When computing became cheap, bandwidth and storage remained expensive. The CPU was idle, but the links were full. This gave us the PC and client-server architectures. A wide range of clients on a variety of networking protocols kept things complicated, and WAN prices meant most network traffic was local.

Eventually, we settled on browsers, HTTP and TCP/IP. This was web computing, with a simple, standard edge and a tiered core. Client-side broadband access and persistent storage were relatively cheap. (Don’t believe they’re cheap? Go into an enterprise and you???ll find their networks and storage systems have plenty of extra capacity. The same is true for the Internet — if you ignore the impact of spam and P2P traffic.)

Now here???s the cloud. It???s driven by five big things, none of which are hype, and all of which are changing the way we compute.

1. Power and cooling are expensive. Today, it costs far more to run computers than it does to buy them in the first place. To save on power, we???re building data centers near dams; for cooling, we’re considering using decommissioned ships. This is about economics and engineering.
2. Demand is global. Storage itself may be cheap, but data processing at scale is hard to do. With millions of consumers using a service, putting data next to computing is the only way to satisfy them.
3. Computing is ubiquitous. We???ve lost our desktop affinity. Most of the devices in the world that can access the Internet aren???t desktops; they???re cell phones. Keeping applications and content on a desktop isn???t just old-fashioned — it???s inconvenient.
4. Applications are built from massive, smart parts. Clouds give developers building blocks they couldn???t build themselves, from storage to authentication to friend feeds to CRM interfaces, letting coders stand on the shoulders of giants.
5. Clouds let us experiment. By removing the cost of staging an environment, a cloud lets a company try new things faster. This is also true of virtualization in general, but by billing on demand the cloud means anyone can experiment.

This truly is a fundamental change in computing, even if its title has been diluted by marketing agendas. We have to be careful not to throw the innovation baby out with the cloud hype bathwater.

If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.

Play around with Songza, a music search engine and Internet jukebox, and the first question that pops up into your head will be: How can this be legal? Whether the latest offering from Humanized, a Chicago-based company, is skirting the legal limits or not, or if it will even be around for long, one thing is for sure — it is damn good. (It is the same peer group as Hype Machine, a start up that we have previously covered .)

Scratch that! Not just good, but awesome — and dead simple. I threw some rather obscure artists at the search engine — Rishi Rich, Veronica, Dub Factory, Nitin Sawhney, and Shri. These artists are not exactly chartbusters, and only real tablatronics are aware of them, yet the quality of the results, and speed with which they were served back, was very impressive. The tracks included some songs I wasn’t even aware existed.

A simple right click is all it takes to play back the songs, share them with others, or build a playlist. The tracks in the playlist are easy to manipulate, and you can move them up and down. If you close the browser and come back after a day or so, the cookie remembers your playlist and plays back the tracks. The quality of music isn’t the greatest, but still not bad for spur of the moment listening. (Update: One of our readers has figured out that much of the tunes are coming from YouTube minus the videos.)

Songza can become a good accompaniment when you don’t have your entire music library handy, but have a distinct craving for Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side Of The Moon.” (Forty-something readers of mine will know exactly when that craving strikes!) Now I just hope they can stick around for a while, because I couldn’t really figure out how they intend to make money.

Related Post from WebWorkerDaily: Humanized’ Enso, Quick Silver for Windows