Google Cloud Print is a devastatingly simple idea. Specially-equipped printers within the office or home go online via Wi-Fi or ethernet, and subsequently connect to Google's Cloud Print headquarters. Anything you want to print, from any location in the world, will be sent via the Internet and Cloud Print to the printer.

Users will use the service to print from Google Docs and Gmail, or print Web pages viewed in Chrome, or perhaps even pictures from Picasa.

Printing from devices like phones has always been tricky, and many less-than-elegant solutions have been offered before now. Apple recently found itself that will allow printing from iPhones and iPads, but which appears to have been put on ice.

Google envisions a future where the USB cable is abandoned and we all purchase cloud-ready printers. However, existing printers can also be utilized. Google Chrome OS apparently includes a background service that can turn any printer attached to the computer into a cloud device. This raises the bizarre possibility of print jobs potentially travelling thousands of miles across the Internet, to Cloud Print headquarters, only to sent straight back to the same physical location as the user and printed on a device less than a meter away.

However, for anybody using the cloud already, this kind of thing won't sound too odd. I sometimes use Gmail as a primitive file sharing service across various computers. I simply e-mail the file to myself, and then access the e-mail on other computer.