Stories about: Google

There are certain key points that have shaped the way technology is today. We've rounded up the 15 most important milestones and explained why they changed the course of the industry.

Enterprise IT shops are starting to embrace the notion of building private clouds, modeling their infrastructure after public service providers such as Amazon and Google. But while virtualization and other technologies exist to create computing pools that can allocate processing power, storage and applications on demand, the technology to manage those distributed resources as a whole is still in the early stages.

To outshine your competitors and win the gig in today's economy, here's a secret to success: Don't abandon the steadfast career tips passed down from generations, but rather, refine them -- with a keen eye for the value in Web 2.0 tools like social networking.

It's official: IT budgets, once so resilient in the face of three years of worsening economic news, aren't immune to the downturn after all.

Adobe Systems has released a public beta of CoCoMo, a hosted service that developers can use to add video conferencing, voice-over-IP and other collaboration features to applications built with its Flex developer tools.

During his keynote speech at the Society for Information Management's SIMposium 08 conference in the US, author Nicholas Carr drew an analogy between cloud computing and the transition that manufacturers made from generating their own power to relying on utilities in the early 20th century.

President-elect Barack Obama's plan to build a Google-enabled government began modestly this week with its new Change.gov Web site, which includes the means to apply for a job in the new administration.

Microsoft this week launched its cloud computing environment, Windows Azure, which is the foundation of the Azure Services Platform for developing applications extending from the cloud to PCs, datacenters, phones, and the Web. Microsoft's goal is to let Windows developers transition from Windows client development to Windows cloud development, using familiar tools, both those from Microsoft and other sources such as Eclipse. Developers would continue to develop apps on their desktops, but the Azure platform would handle the app deployment in the cloud.

With support for three of the major pillars of application development and deployment -- Oracle 11g, Microsoft SQL, and open source MySQL -- under its belt, Amazon.com appears to be anticipating a major move by the enterprise into the cloud.

Science and technology may not have been the focus of the recent debates between presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barack Obama, but both candidates have outlined some broad policy proposals and goals. That's a good thing, because, as some of the top technology thinkers in the United States today recently shared with Computerworld, the next president will have to tackle the country's ongoing decline in global technological competitiveness.

When it came time for Washington, D.C., to create a new intranet for city employees, spending US$4 million on a site based on proprietary portal software just didn't seem like a good idea to CTO Vivek Kundra. But using Google Apps did, he said in an interview Tuesday.