Eric Schmidt. Dr. Half IBM.

This evening I was reading the post mortem from 3Q earnings announcements.  Google surged with a 26% increase in earnings, to $1.35 billion.  IBM was suffering a tad in Europe, but still posted gains from a year ago, earning $2.8 billion.

It took a minute for that to sink in.

Google, founded in 1998, now earns 48% as much as IBM.  A large portion of that money comes from a new market, tapping a need for people to reach each other at time of transaction, and sell their wares.  Most of this money is automated, moving through online systems, running in a cloud.  Contrast this with the labor, hardware-driven revenue of IBM and companies like them.

Amazing.

I don’t want a generic application in the cloud.  That’s probably what Richard Stallman is all in a tizzy about.  Just handing over all my private data to some application, that I have no idea where its running, scares the bejeezus out of me, too.  Maybe others are comfortable uploading keys to their life savings to Web 2.0 companies like mint.com.  Personally, it freaks me out.

Yet I’m still a huge proponent of cloud computing.  Why?  Simple.  Its the computing part I want.  I want raw storage, raw computing, raw bandwidth.  Let me encrypt my data and build my systems by hand, the open source way, so I know they’re safe.

Give me 60Hz 120V power and a three-pronged plug.  IBM, give us Blue Plumbing. 

Allow us to buy a raw Intel machine or Z-series capable of running any OS.  Sell us a wavelength on fiber for a truly private network.  Open up those gorgeous SAN machines and Netapp Filer wanna-be’s and let us buy reliable storage by the bit. Create vast arrays of cheap SATA drives like MySpace and Photobucket, then sell it to us as an S3 competitor. Sell us a chunk of your AT&T contract as cheap CDN bandwidth for a nickel a Gig. Turn MQ Series into an uber-reliable messaging service.

IBM engineers build incredible infrastructure; they often invent it. Its in their Poughkeepsie and Watson Blue blood. Don’t sell ‘em short by packing the Web equivalent of crapware into the cloud.

Amazon Web Services is a true cloud provider, at least in my book.  In 15 minutes I was able to Google for new information on their Elastic Block Storage, download the appropriate 128-bit key encrypted tools, create a 100Gig slice of a Netapp filer, and allocate it to my virtual machine that runs this blog.  That blew me away.  For kicks I created another computing instance in EC2, dropped my first instance, and re-attached the drive.  That was another 5 minutes. The cycle time is incredible.

Google gives us Python, forcing a language abstraction.  IBM forces us to eat a version of social networking.  Salesforce hawks leftover CRM systems as an app platform.  Those guys are living in the (recent) past, where applications running on a server somewhere have been relabeled as “cloud computing.”   If that’s all Larry Ellison is reading and hearing about from his marketers, no wonder he calls cloud computing “complete gibberish.” That’s not the cloud I want, either.