The cloud is winning.

Seated in front of the PC in my home office just the other day, I started MS-Outlook to check my email. As the program started, it flashed the Outlook-2000 banner. It had not occurred to me until that moment that I was using 9-year old software to handle one of the most critical communication tasks in my life.

That flash screen got me to thinking about my email use, needs, and the systems that provide the essential services. I use at least five different computers in my daily work and personal life. Three of them are Win-XP PCs. One of those is a laptop. The other PC is an iMac. The XP machines are: (1) My work PC - a five-year old Gateway; (2) My laptop - a three-year old Gateway on which I write this post at 24,000 feet above Arkansas; (3) My home-office PC - a home-built machine of undertmined age. I think the oldest component is probably over ten years old while the newest (the flat screen monitor) is about two years old. This machine has been "upgraded" one piece at a time for so long that I simply don't know its heritage. The fourth machine is an iMac 24" at home. I love it for its great display, for iPhoto and iTunes and streaming NetFlix. I hate it for how clumsy I am at using the Apple differences when I've become so smoothly practiced with XP. I am not ready to migrate for all home-office uses, and won't be until Quicken and my genealogy programs provide the same functionality on the iMac as on XP. In the meantime, I'm working toward a virtual XP machine on the iMac. The fifth is my Palm Centro smartphone.

For this menagerie of machines and systems, there is a similary diverse set of software providing email client servies. As I mentioned above, the home machine uses Outlook 2000. At work I have Outlook 2003, while I use Mozilla Firebird 2.0 on the laptop and the iMac Apple Mail program on that machine. The Centro uses VersaMail 4.0. Each of these email clients interfaces across the Internet with two mail servers. My company has an Ability server which handles my work email. My personal email resides on a Go-Daddy server somewhere. The three XP machines, the iMac, and the Centro all access those emails using the Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3), itself an antiquated protocol. Let's add one complicating factor: I also maintain a Yahoo! email account as a backup and to use for registering software and Internet shopping sites. (Yes, I know I'm Bloggin on Google, but I don't use GMail simply because I've had the Yahoo! address for so very many years.

I mentioned earlier that I'd been thinking about my use of email. And here's what I thought: Why does this need to be so complicated? Why keep email clients on my PCs? Why not just access the email in the cloud Netbook-style as my daughter does on the Netbook I gave her for Christmas? This leads to another step: Why not simplify one step further and consolidate all of my email into one cloud system, like, for instance, GMail.

I need my work email address with its "professional" domain address and I like having my personal email using my vanity domain. It has been nice to keep my Web registrations and such on Yahoo! mail as that keeps a lot of spam and such away from my POP3 email. But I can access the Internet from nearly anywhere (Delta tells me I can even do it from here at 24,000 feet, soon.) If a Web email can consolidate all of my email in one place, still tell me which system received the email, and send and reply from the preferred domains, why, that would be nice.

I alread use Google Docs and have found it to be a wonderful way to share documents and to collaborate on work. A large client I work for is moving all of their documents from PCs and small networks into MS Sharepoint server. My early experience with the system has me impressed with the possibilities the system represents. Think of it as Google Docs on steroids and inside a fence.

So I'm considering moving more of my work and my information to the cloud. I'm not sure whose cloud it will be, yet, but I don't think it will be MS's OfficeLive. I've looked at it and have not seen much that impresses me. I know that some companies and local governments are getting great mileage out of Google applications (for an example, see http://www.marketingvox.com/draft-government-ditches-office-for-web-based-apps-041421/.) Where will it be? I'll have to look and learn, and I'll keep you posted as I learn enough to start making some decisions. Maybe the main point here is that PC applications do not currently seem to be the future of computing. Several years ago, there was a move to the "dumb terminal" for personal computing. What a dumb name. But the concept seems to be winning, we are just calling it cloud computing now.