I like it. Former Microsoft executive Vic Gundotra may have come up with what is the simplest way to describe the differences in Google's and Microsoft's approaches to cloud computing:
Gundotra demurred when asked if Microsoft just doesn't get Web development. He said some companies are native Web speakers, while others speak Web with a heavy accent.
It happened at a dinner party When one of his friends asked him a question he didn't know the answer to, Gundotra's four-year-old daughter, Tiger, asked where his phone was.
Gundotra realized that his daughter asked him for his phone because every time he didn't know the answer to something, she'd seen him whip out his Palm and do a Google query. Of course, Tiger didn't know that Google was responsible for imparting the knowledge, but she knew the phone was the place to look when daddy was stumped.
"That's what the information age is," Gundotra said. "Every question that is knowable is answerable because of the power of Google."
Programming for the Web is, of course, an entirely different culture than programming for a single software platform, and Gundotra has taken to the new culture with all the zeal of a convert. "The previous platform I was responsible for evangelizing helped one company. The Web helps all of mankind," he said. [Before Google, he spent 15 years at Microsoft working on various iterations of the Windows operating system and presiding over the company's move from Win32 to the .Net architecture.]