Introducing "Cloud as a Feature" Integrated with PC Applications

I keep thinking that, at some point, I will cease to be astonished as new information technology products become available. However, this has not happened for me in more than two decades. Nick Carr, a very astute observer of the IT scene who blogs over at Rough Type, has described a new phenomenon that he calls cloud as a feature  (see: Cloud as a feature). I have blogged about cloud computing in previous notes if you want some background information about this topic. Simply put, the "cloud" is a global network of computers that can be accessed via the web and that can be "rented" for large-scale computer processing applications or major data storage. Below is an excerpt from Nick's 's note with boldface emphasis mine:

Microsoft has been touting its "software plus services" strategy for some time, but if you want see some of the most creative thinking about how to meld cloud services with traditional PC software you'd do well to look not at Microsoft but at Mathematica. Wolfram Research, which makes Mathemetica, a heavy-duty and widely used program for computation and modeling, announced last week that it will build "the cloud" into the latest version of the application, delivering utility computing as, in essence, a seamless feature of its software....A representative from Amazon Web Services explains how Mathematica will tap into EC2 and the benefits it can provide to users:

Mathematica is a true cloud service offering. They connect to Amazon's Cloud from within Mathematica. So you can simply use all the powerful features of Mathematica and ask it to run it in the cloud....[W]ith the new Cloud service, users can evaluate the entire notebook in one shot by pushing it to the cloud.

The HPC [high performance computing] Cloud Service lets users...click a few buttons in the HPC Cloud Service GUI and ask it to run it in the cloud....We certainly need a nifty abbreviation for the merging of cloud services into traditional PC software, so let me suggest CaaF, for Cloud-as-a-Feature....By radically changing the economics of high-performance computing, the cloud democratizes the supercomputer. What Wolfram is doing points to one way that software companies can exploit those new economics.

The essence of Nick's point is contained in his phrase: changing the economics of high-performance computing, the cloud democratizes the supercomputer. In about a generation, we have seen high performance computing move from university computing centers and top-level secret governmental labs to PCs and high school science projects. I understand that the ability to work with an application like Mathematica is beyond the ability of many of us, but this is only the leading edge of the emerging phenomenon of CaaF. We will undoubtedly soon see PC applications enabling most of us to, say, set up computer simulations or models to assist us in solving some of the workaday problems that we all face.