cloud computing : Schmidt: There is an emergent new model [that] starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing – they should be in a "cloud" somewhere. And that if you have the right kind of browser or the right kind of access, it doesn't matter whether you have a PC or a Mac or a mobile phone or a BlackBerry or what have you – or new devices still to be developed – you can get access to the cloud. . . . The computation and the data and so forth are in the servers. . . .
¶What's interesting is that the two – "cloud computing and advertising – go hand-in-hand. There is a new business model that's funding all of the software innovation to allow people to have platform choice, client choice, data architectures that are interesting, solutions that are new – and that's being driven by advertising.
¶Sullivan: One of the other things you mentioned, the advertising [that] helps [Google] go out and fund all these things – search has been this huge driver. We continue to turn to search. We confess our innermost desires to it. And this week, on Monday, AOL had released a large amount of search data. And the intentions were honorable, they released the data so that researchers could see how people were searching. And they thought that they had protected the privacy of the people because they replaced all the user names with tokens or anonymous numbers. But people quickly discovered that because I could find the profile of a particular person that we could track it back. And The New York Times [published a front-page story about a woman whose identity was easily found this way] – this woman has become the poster child of search privacy. So she's kind of probably the most innocent person of some of this data that they could pick out. But it was very revealing. But it raised, this whole issue has raised all sorts of issues. Now we've had queries where you could see someone doing searches that looked like they were planning to murder their wife. You've got searches where you think people might be doing illegal stuff, and just searches that are embarrassing. (†571)
