> I find this scary somehow, because Google therefore needs to:
> 1) Know who you are (some tracking ID I guess)
> 2) Where you browse the web (Google search, Google Chrome)
> 3) Where you are located and what places you did look for (Google maps)
Google isn't the only company with this information. There are several to many companies that aggregate a great deal of personal information on web and phone users (how do I know this?).
If you don't want to see those ads, you can block them. At least on PCs. It's harder on phones but it's possible.
> Regarding the cloud business: I remember a report, think it
> was in the Economist, where they stated that actually Amazon
> is a bigger cloud service provider than Google. The biggest
> in the world, actually. They simply offer server capacity for
> rent at a very cheap price. I suppose Amazon is Intel's biggest
> customer when it comes to server processors. Google is also at
> the top, just as Microsoft. The problem is, that less servers
> are sold to companies and you have a lot of synergies on
> centralized server farms, e.g. by virtual machines etc. That
> means that capacity is going away from single machines on
> corporate level to global server farms with shared resources
> - less server processors required for this.
There are a lot of players and a lot of different kinds of cloud services out there. You have Rackspace which will give you a machine or a piece of a machine to the larger companies that will give you SQL Server or Oracle or a software stack to companies that will sell you a business application on a cloud to being on a share host with 1,000 other customers, most that aren't really doing much on the machine.
I agree that you have less waste of resources with the cloud. It's like using an apartment building instead of a house. You have a lot of shared resources with an apartment building. But some people like privacy, the ability to alter their living space, and not having to deal with loud neighbors or neighbors with people that don't like them.
The scariest part about running a shared-host cloud service? If one cloud customer breaks through whatever wall you have between customers and can access all of the other customers' data on the shared host.
