Cloud computing is the hot new buzzword in tech these days. But who knew the killer app for this brave new world would be plain

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问题     Cloud computing is the hot new buzzword in tech these days. But who knew the killer app for this brave new world would be plain old e-mail? Yet that is exactly what’s happening. "E-mail has become the easiest workload for customers to move to the cloud," says Chris Capossela, a senior vice president at Microsoft.
    What this shift means, basically, is that instead of buying your own computer servers and paying a team of techies to run your e-mail system, you can instead rent e-mail as a service. Microsoft—or Google or IBM—runs your e-mail system on its servers, taking care of security, software updates, and bugs. It’s the first step in a larger shift in which, over the next decade, much of the computing that takes place in corporate data centers will migrate out onto the cloud. As it unfolds, it could create new winners and losers among big tech companies.
    Microsoft reckons that the average customer can save 30 percent on e-mail by moving to the cloud. A company with 1,000 employees might spend $2 million a year on e-mail, so the savings are significant. Proponents say cloud-based mail is not just cheaper, it’s also better. With cloud-based mail each user can have huge amounts of storage space—25 gigabytes or more— while a traditional "on-premises" e-mail system might allow users only 100 megabytes.
    Rexel, a French distributor of electrical equipment, expects to cut its e-mail costs by one third by moving its employees from a hodgepodge of systems to a single cloud-based one, operated by Microsoft, says Olivier Baldassari, the company’s chief information officer. So far Rexel has shifted 4,000 of its 28,000 employees to a cloud version of Microsoft Exchange and plans to get everyone moved over by the end of 2011.
    Microsoft wasn’t the first to offer cloud-based mail to corporate customers; it had to play catch-up with Google. But for companies already using Exchange, it’s often easier to move employees to the cloud version of what they already know than to switch them over to a new system. Serena, a software company in Redwood City, California, last year went from on-premi-ses Exchange to Google’s Gmail but is migrating again, to the cloud-based version of Exchange, mostly because its employees are more familiar with it. "Making the change to Google was gut-wrenching for a lot of people," says Ron Brister, Serena’s director of IT. "People just weren’t getting used to it. "
    Microsoft sees the cloud as a competitive weapon, a chance to pull customers away from rivals like IBM, which sells an on-premises messaging system called Notes. "Customers are using the cloud as a way to move to Microsoft," Capossela says, citing new customers like Gl-axoSmithKline, Coca-Cola, and Kraft Foods. But wait—IBM claims it’s doing the same thing right back to Microsoft. IBM sells a cloud-based mail solution called LotusLive iNotes and has lured away from Microsoft such customers as Panasonic, which is moving 300,000 employees onto an IBM cloud.
According to the passage, Google’s Gmail

选项 A、is not a cloud-based version and difficult to use.
B、was issued earlier than Microsoft’s similar service.
C、has fully lost its battle with Microsoft’s Exchange.
D、has a great popularity among the employees of Serena.

答案B

解析 事实细节题。由题干关键词Google’s Gmail定位至第五段首句。该句提及,微软并非第一个为合作客户提供云计算邮件的企业:该公司曾经落后于谷歌,由此可推知,谷歌的Gmail运用云计算早于微软,故答案为[B]。[A]认为Gmail没有运用云计算,含义与原文相反,故排除;第五段第三句只是提及盛瑞纳由使用Gmail转向使用微软,并不能推出Gmail完全输给了微软,故排除[C];由第五段末尾“转移至谷歌的Gmail系统对大部分人而言是极其痛苦的”可知,Gmail并未受到盛瑞纳的欢迎,而是又被放弃了,故排除含义相反的[D]。
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