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Comment by barkingcat | Hacker News Reader

The word "cloud" loses all meaning in this article.

"The irony is that in fleeing the cloud, Dropbox is showing why the cloud is so powerful. It too is building infrastructure so that others don’t have to. It too is, well, a cloud company."

Wait ... so using AWS is "cloud", having your own servers is "cloud" too. Everything is cloudy!

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Remember, there is no cloud, there is just someone else's computer... =)

Was discussing "in the cloud" with my wife yesterday, and I said "It just means on some company's servers." Which suddenly de-mystified the whole concept for her.

I was at PDC in 2008 when Microsoft announced "Windows Azure".

I've never been more confused in my life. "Wait, what does this version of Windows do?"

Luckily they rebranded it as just "Microsoft Azure" which makes a shit ton more sense.

Dropbox is clearly a cloud company to its users. Whether or not they use a generic cloud, or maintain their own systems, is an implementation detail to users of the service.

Let us hope that the IoT buzzword doesn't get abused as much as "cloud" has in the past 4-5 years.

As someone who works for a company whose main business is IoT/M2M/Connected Devices/Embedded Stuff on the Internet, it already has been and it almost meaningless.

There's already a Cloud over IP! My brain melt down trying to understand what that means.

I hope there will be no "IoT over IP"

It is true that there are two concepts conflated in "the cloud". The first, and by far the most important from a technology standpoint, is the ability to grow and shrink pools of storage, servers, databases, etc. simply by plugging and unplugging hardware. Robust failover, dynamic data replication, all these things are necessary before you can begin having cloud services, and in fact, Google and others had this well before there was such a thing as a cloud.

The second aspect is paying on an incremental basis for someone else to provide the pools developed in the first part. But that's more or less a trivial extension once you've got the first.

What they probably mean is that Dropbox has its own cloud. I'm assuming that they do have some kind of system similar to amazon ec2 to start and kill vms at will, and other similar basic cloud services.

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