Ever read this one to your kid?  Great story!  I recommend it because it is silly and lots of fun.

Well, that story reminds me of the Cloud Computing/Cloud Storage BS flying around these days. I’m sorry to rain on some people’s parade, but for Pete’s sake, do we have to keep inventing new buzz words for stuff?  (Yes, of course we do, because it’s fun.)

I’m not the only one who thinks this Cloud thing has gone too far. Mike Elgan’s great article in Datamation expresses a similar opinion. We differ in our adjectives for “Cloud computing”: he chose dangerous and misleading, while I prefer silly.

Mike sees danger because the ambiguity of the term confuses rather than enlightens. I agree wholeheartedly that popular ill-defined buzzwords distort communication and hence can be dangerous. But I doubt serious people write “cloud this” or “cloud that” into contracts or quotes for services. In fact, I doubt that language using the word “cloud” survives serious environments at all, so it probably isn’t all that dangerous. I mean, who suffers if two researchers sit around saying cloud-this and cloud-that to impress each other about how their ideas pertain to the cloud structure of the universe? What if they both fell forward into their plates of cloud soup and fell asleep?

Who uses this term, then? People who want to be “with it” and appear to be “in the know.” People who don’t want to be left behind. People who want to frame ideas as something new, rather than technicalities of something old.

We draw a piece of a system block diagram as a cloud to mean “there’s a bunch of crap going on in here and the details don’t matter.” Of course this infuriates cloud people, because to them it’s all about the cloud. Pardon me for not getting that. The problem is, I do get it – and it’s still not all about the cloud.