Please Stop Saying 'Cloud' | Hacker News Reader

Please Stop Saying 'Cloud'

redmondmag.com

17 pointsmsredmond17 comments

The IT community is telling the IT community to stop saying "cloud" because the marketing community says it too much.

Yes, this will work.

It's a phrase that people, normal people, are somewhat comprehending. That makes it one of the most well-known computer-related terms around. Why should it be abandoned, just because it's vague? The non-geek world (ie, the world) rarely gets this far into comprehending the geek world, why change it underneath them?

No one actually knows what it is. A few weeks ago, my sister asked me "What's the cloud?" and I had to explain it to her. She still doesn't understand it.

Microsoft and IT marketing fools in general are just throwing around a buzz word, except that this one is confusing to people due to its incorrect and frequent usage.

They do tend to have a vague understanding that it involves the internet, though. Which is all it really implies, with an emphasis on off-site storage and/or computation when spoken by a geek.

This is a brand-new term, relatively speaking. Ask people what a browser is, something they've had for years and use for hours every day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ

The Windows 7 "to the cloud!" commercials enrage me. Remoting to your home PC from the airport is not "the cloud."

I just assumed that family lives in Cloud City

Seriously. Those commercials play a pretty significant role in confusing everyone as to what the cloud is. It's going to become 2011's Web 2.0 buzz word.

Fine, I'm using Claude instead.

So an IT director doesn't want to outsource IT to the cloud? Shocking :-) And I guess they didn't talk about private clouds at the conference.

It may surprise you, but some people have trouble being responsible for things they have no control over.

When outsourcing to the 'cloud' works it's evidence that internal IT is flawed. When outsourcing doesn't work it's evidence that internal IT is flawed.

> being responsible for things they have no control over.

You have control over the cloud. More so than you have over the manufactures of the chips and other components that go into your servers, or the engineers who wrote the firmware for your router, or the Product manager of the OS you use, or etc. etc.

It's a copout strawman argument.

No surprise at all, but we are all continually depending on things we have no control over, hardware, software, people, networks, politics, disasters, health, etc. In the cloud you have the option of a private cloud, which is a lot of control with a better operations model. There are several clouds to select from, some are less wild west than Amazon, so you do have control in your selection criteria, your negotiated SLAs, your negotiated support plan, your architecture and deployment policies, your disaster and recovery and redundancy plans, and your strategies for moving to another cloud. So you have a very high degree of control if you think about it, act to take it, and make smart decisions. What you can't do is just move an enterprise wholesale into the cloud, but that's a good thing.

I'm sure the same guy complained about the word 'Grid' or the word 'Cluster' or the words 'Tier 1.'

Buzzwords come and go, when they get over used they are more confusing than clarifying. Since many (if not most) of the folks who buy computers don't have any formal education in computers and what they do, the only way they can reason about them is by analogy. Reasoning by analogy begets buzzwords (tautology). Amongst professionals, reasoning by analogy is an OK place to start but it should quickly solidify into something you can walk back to first principles.

I once heard someone say that they called it 'cloud' computing because "You can't touch it, if you're in the middle of it you can't navigate, and sooner or later its going to dump a pile of crap on you and ruin your picnic." Seemed like they 'got it.'

I always believe in using a term correctly, no matter how confusing it is. It's not imorotant whether people understand what exactly the cloud is, but they should understand that VPN/remote desktop is not using the "cloud" and email just barely qualifies. This phenomenon happens with other terms like "nanotech" just as frequently. The solution isn't necessarily to teach everyone what the technical meaning is, it's to not apply it liberally to situations that don't qualify.

The headline reminded me of a video of Larry Ellison: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UYa6gQC14o

My site Tagxedo (http://www.tagxedo.com) makes is a word cloud app, so naturally I set up a Twitter search on the phrase "word cloud", and I track it using Tweetdeck.

However, I think at least 1/3 of the tweets captured by this search is of the form:

"Stop using the word cloud!"

"If I hear the word 'cloud' one more time my head will explode!"

and so on.

Disagree.

Let's stop saying "Please Stop Saying".

This guy blames the IT marketing industry. I blame everyone (including myself) that ever handed a management-type a Visio diagram with a cloud graphic representing the Internet.

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