The Cloud: No Sir, I Don't Like It

My point is that to me, "Cloud" is a software engineering term. It affects the way I think about implementing services. However, the term is being misappropriated by the media (in a similar way to "Hacker") to describe what to me appears to be just plain-old web services (or paper-hostage-holding services to quote the linked article).

This is because consumers use these services in the same way they always have. The cloud hasn't introduced some new magical way of interacting with the services. Using Dropbox as an example, it is a Cloud service because it is implemented on top of AWS. That's an internal technical issue though, of interest to the audience of HN, but not to the general public [1].

To summarise, I agree that "the Cloud" is overused, but is of interest from a technical point of view. However, the linked article is not a technical article for cloud implementers, but rather service consumers.

[1] There is the separate issue of how well the cloud service has been implemented, as the recent AWS outage has reminded us. Having a robust, secure service is of course important to the lay consumer. But services need to be robust and secure whether they are cloud based or not.