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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

That's a very misleading set of partial quotes to assemble in that order...

Ellison wasn't confused about any of the technical topics around cloud computing. He was complaining about the marketing trend at the time of slapping the "cloud computing" buzzword on all kinds of things that already existed.

This is a thing that happens in the tech world a lot, and it is pretty annoying. A more modern example is the over-use of "serverless" buzzword.

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https://youtu.be/0FacYAI6DY0?t=57

Should have had an ellipsis between the 2nd and 3rd bit, but the intent wasn't altered. He's calling it gibberish and nonsense.

I wasn't trying to imply that he actually was confused, I was trying to show how he thought the term was gibberish.

I mean, who would take seriously the thought that Ellison actually thought of himself as an idiot.

No, he’s not complaining about the marketing. He’s basically saying cloud computing is nothing, just a redefinition of existing computing. He’s not complaining about the marketing. He’s saying that cloud computing is only marketing. Clearly he was wrong.

Was he clearly wrong though? I listened through the whole clip and it seems like he was spot on to me. Steve Jobs made similar comments about cloud in the 90s - it’s really just mainframe 2.0.

No, cloud at root is dynamic on-demand provisioning. A lot of times SaaS built on top of cloud was (and is) marketed as cloud, without meaningfully offering dynamic on-demand provisioning to the customer, which blurs it a bit, but cloud had a distinct definition that was neither just SaaS or “mainframe 2.0” in any sense where using the term dismissively makes any sense.

He's wrong like those "There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer" t-shirts are wrong.

IE: not wrong, but too literal and short sighted.

> He's wrong like those "There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer" t-shirts are wrong.

> IE: not wrong

Private cloud is cloud, and its not someone else’s computer, so, “not wrong” is not not wrong.

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