What are some current Google-scale challenges? Google hosts tens of millions of users on the consumer version of Gmail; 7 million photos are uploaded to Picasa every day; and 10 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. He noted that as vendors build more data centers, the cost will come down, creating more opportunities to build powerful applications.

"What if you had unlimited scalability?" Chandra asked the audience. "What projects would you be doing that you're not doing today? The opportunity is limitless."

4. Barriers to Adoption Are Falling

Barriers to adoption of cloud computing are falling, Chandra says, though challenges remain. Namely, the big hurdles include security, user experience, reliability and offline mode, he says. With respect to security, Chandra takes a typical Google approach: He challenges the current state of enterprise security and contends that it's pretty weak.

For instance, he notes that one out of 10 laptops gets stolen, and from a corporate perspective, laptops store 60 percent of corporate data. If that information were in the cloud instead of on a laptop, the loss of the hardware would be trivial, he says.

"Our vice president [and president of Google Enteprise] Dave Girouard got his laptop stolen while he was at a San Francisco Giants game," Chandra says. "He called our CIO, and said, my laptop is stolen, now should I get a Mac or a PC?" That story elicited chuckles from the audience.