Elizabeth Kasameyer has always loved taking photographs, but only recently did she find a satisfying way to share them: She pays $25 a year to use Flickr - Yahoo's photo-sharing Web site.
By signing up for the online service, Kasameyer joined a revolution that some call "cloud computing" and others have dubbed the "big switch."
With the spread of broadband Internet, Flickr and other Web-based services are becoming increasingly popular. As a result, home and business computing are moving from individual PCs to huge networks owned by companies such as IBM, Google and Yahoo.
Such is the potential for attracting users to Internet-based programs that Microsoft announced a $44.6 billion takeover bid for Yahoo, the second-largest Web portal and Microsoft's best hope for battling Google in the world of cloud computing.
"Microsoft sees that more and more consumer software is going to be served through the Internet," said Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review.
Experts compare Web-based programs to the advent of the electrical grid, which shifted power generation away from individual homes. Just as people now pay for electricity generated from far away, they are increasingly paying for software, data storage and processing strength that are housed on distant computer networks, a combined service that is known as "computing power."
"Some day in the future, you may buy computer power like electricity," said Jimmy Lin, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. "It's thinking of things as services as opposed to products."
For many, that future is now. Among the companies challenging Microsoft's dominance in traditional programs, Google now offers Google Docs, a suite of Internet-based applications that compete with classic Microsoft Office programs such as Word, Outlook and Excel.
Experts say the grid approach offers many of the same benefits and drawbacks of the electrical grid. Centralized processing can be more efficient, offering customers more computing power for the buck. But small glitches and security breaches can affect millions at once - and computer automation may cost some people their jobs.
"It's going to continue to make computing much cheaper and available, but will also have ramifications for various aspects of life," said Carr, author of a book on the rise of cloud computing titled The Big Switch.
