PricewaterhouseCoopers has issued its technology forecast for the next three years, claiming, quite boldly, that computing will become a utility service, like electricity or water.

"Companies will no longer be responsible for operating their own computing infrastructure any more than they operate their own electricity generation plants or water reservoirs," the forecast claims.

The Internet will eventually emerge as a "global networked computing utility, replacing computing as we know it today", according to the report. Companies would access and pay for computing offered by a service provider in this evolution of the Internet.

Key to the new forecast is the predicted rise of what is called 'grid computing'. Grid computing, according to the Grid Computing Info Centre (www.gridcomputing.com), allows enterprises to link together geographically distributed resources, giving access to resources to users across the world. These linked computer clusters enable sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed resources, such as supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, instruments, and people.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, such systems are already being developed through the Internet. The rise of grid computing today is however limited to experimental scientists analysing large amounts of data.

"In much the same way the Internet began as an effort to share computing resources among academic researchers before spreading to businesses and then to consumers, grid computing will eventually be used by enterprises,"

PricewaterhouseCoopers said. "More important, research into grid computing will lead to the creation of software that will solve critical problems companies now face in building distributed inter-enterprise applications."

In this world of grid computing the Internet 'becomes as ubiquitous as the telephone network and as easy to access as picking up a phone,' according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

"As this evolves, the global telephone network will move from its current state - islands of voice-over-Internet Protocol (IP) surrounded by an ocean of legacy telephone system protocols - to the use of IP on an end-to-end basis," the report states.

"In this progression, telecom carriers will lose the monopoly they have on the creation of new telephone services. Eventually, anyone with an Internet connection will be a potential service provider just as anyone with an Internet connection today can be a content provider merely by setting up a Website."

This sounds grand, but with the current state of Internet security, will companies jump on the "grid computing" bandwagon in the time frame predicted by PricewaterhouseCoopers?

Companies may entrust their electrical needs to some other company, but the large ones have backup generators to keep the company functioning in case of blackouts, an occurrence not uncommon in Bermuda.

With data and special systems there's a lot more to lose than a temporary shut down if the service provider is dishonest, or has lax security.

Microsoft's IT guys and girls have finally gotten the message (after how long?), that most people using their software are not propellor heads.

"Dear Microsoft customer," begins the unctuous e-mail sent to me last week from Steve Lipner, director of Microsoft Corp.'s Security Assurance department. "I'm taking the unusual step of sending this mail to the Microsoft security notification service mailing list to tell you about some changes in communications practices that the Microsoft Security Response Centre is making."

First, Microsoft has issued 64 security bulletins and patches to its software this year, compared to 60 for all of last year. This means they're long on "assurance" and short on security for their products.

They actually have a guy, Lipner, whose job it is to assure us that all is well, just keep patching that product.

"Customer feedback tells us that, while technical professionals value our security bulletins, many end-users find them overly detailed and confusing" Lipner continues. "In addition, end-users who subscribe to the Microsoft Security Notification Service receive bulletins that are of interest only to developers or system administrators."

To get over this problem of people not understanding what a particular security notification is about Lipner has created a "less technical end-user security bulletin" at .

The new "end-user" security bulletins describe steps that customers can take to help keep their systems secure. The current security bulletins targeted to technical professionals will continue.

Microsoft also plans to start a similar security notification service for the less-technically adept customers who need to fix their software. As I have advised previously, if you are a Microsoft user you should sign up to the current security bulletins, even if they might seem technical.

Once you wade through the jargon, all you have to do is click on the link to the patch. Once you start downloading the patch you will be automatically informed of whether you need it or not.

Under the "Tools" menu in your Internet Explorer browser you will also find the Windows automatic update facility. Use it regularly. I checked out the new site for us common folk and found it does have some great practical advice, on online privacy, updates, and security.

Hey, old dogs can learn new tricks.