Mark Knows It All

The theme for this week’s Business Week magazine was sports promotion. It tackled everything from winning teams that were “bought” (Steinbrenner’s Yankees to DeBartolo, Jr.’s 49ers) to advertising debacles such as Citigroup buying naming rights for a new stadium as the government was bailing it out…hence the name Bailout Field!! Interesting stuff. But more germane to my life was a series of articles preceding the sports section about IT, or for us mere mortals, Information Technology. The first article dealt with “cloud” computing. That means most computer functions and storage are handled through offsite third party servers. This acts as a money saver for big business because they can buy bare bones hardware that only needs as much power and disc space to allow it to connect to these remote servers where the hard core stuff takes place. More efficiency means more bottom line revenue. Makes sense, I think! Cloud computing is also moving down to “retail” clients like you and me who m