Over the past cou­ple weeks I’ve been try­ing a new exper­i­ment. Now that I’ve embraced the “net­book lifestyle,” I thought I’d see what this cloud com­put­ing thing was really all about. While I have Microsoft Office 2007 loaded on my HP Mini-​Note, I thought I’d try Google apps instead.

The way I see it, there’s two dif­fer­ent par­a­digms to use with netbooks.

  1. Thin client, or web-​based. Using web-​based appli­ca­tions and liv­ing out of the browser. This has become much more fea­si­ble than it used to be, and oth­ers have made a pretty good go of using only Fire­fox for all their com­put­ing needs. And thanks to Google Gears, you can even work offline (albeit with some pretty sig­nif­i­cant limitations).
  2. Thick client, or what used to be called client-​server com­put­ing. Here you use tra­di­tional desk­top soft­ware and either store your data in the cloud or sync your data through the cloud to other PCs.

Tech­ni­cally there is a third option, just using the net­book like any other com­puter and not using net­worked data at all, but where’s the fun in that?

The most pop­u­lar option, at least among the tech­no­rati, is option one. Google’s office suite (Gmail, Docs, Note­book, Cal­en­dar) does a pretty good job of replac­ing heav­ier client-​side apps like Microsoft Office or OpenOf­fice. And if you’re using a com­puter designed to be online all the time, why not use online tools?

Sup­ple­ment­ing Google’s suite with a few addi­tional ser­vices like Remem­ber The Milk for task man­age­ment and ScribeFire’s Fire­fox plu­gin for blog­ging, I tried this out for a week. I even ditched Exchange on my Treo and used GooSync and MilkSync along with Gmail’s IMAP ser­vice to use Google ser­vices on Win­dows Mobile (which works, but not as well as Android, alas). I used Gears to allow offline use in RTM, Docs, etc. And it worked, sorta.

I tried to like it, I really did. And the inte­gra­tion between Google Docs, Note­book and iGoogle is pretty com­pelling. I was able to keep my doc­u­ments online and edit­ing them was fast and easy. I expect I’d like Google Docs a lot more if I was doing any active col­lab­o­ra­tion, it looks really good for that. But the lim­i­ta­tions got to me. You can’t cre­ate a new doc­u­ment in Google Docs when you’re offline, among other things.

Because that’s what really made the deci­sion for me. It’s easy to get online with a net­book, but it’s not a given. I’ve found that WiFi hotspots are far more com­mon that I would have sus­pected, but they’re not every­where. I can tether my net­book to my Treo pretty eas­ily, but that involves a cable (I can’t seem to get it work­ing with Blue­tooth or WiFi, even with PdaNet), which means a sta­ble setup where I’m going to be for a while. For quick work, jot­ting some­thing down quickly (10 min­utes or less) set­ting up a cel­lu­lar inter­net con­nec­tion is too much of a has­sle. And as a result, I wasn’t using my net­book as often as I could have.

If I was using an even smaller net­book, like the Asus eee 700 series with just 4GB of flash and pretty much instant-​on Linux, I’d be more inclined to make web-​based apps work. But I have an XP-​based net­book with a 120GB hard drive. I have the abil­ity to use local stor­age, local soft­ware and the full power of Win­dows. Why not use it along with the best of cloud com­put­ing? (and yes, there is a vision for more, but I’ll get to that in another article)

So instead of liv­ing in the clouds, I’ve got a core group of local soft­ware that ties into the cloud for stor­age and sync, allow­ing me to work offline with no com­pro­mises when I have to, but have all the ben­e­fits of the net when can. I’ll detail my set up soon, but for now, how are you using cloud computing?