Comments on: Cloud Computing and Marketing Hype

By: April Dunford

April Dunford — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:09:48 +0000

@mathewi Posted this after Ellison’s "cloud is everything we do" talk http://bit.ly/1u74pT If only marketing controls a def’n, it’s trouble

By: April

April — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:27:32 +0000

Hi Trevor,
Thanks for the comment!
I agree with you that not all decision makers are deeply technical and everyone (even the techies) needs a set of good short hand terms to talk about complicated concepts.
I’m a big fan of easy to understand terms that folks can use to describe technology, and I like the idea of using cloud computing to describe what Google and Amazon are trying to do. I would love to see them put more marketing muscle behind it to make it clearer for customers so that when they use it as shorthand, everyone knows what it is shorthand for.
April

By: Trevor Stafford

Trevor Stafford — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:13:06 +0000

What most tech people forget is that they live in an echo chamber…an in-crowd nerdtopia where everybody knows what everybody else is talking about on a very high level.
Trouble is, most people aren’t tech people. The average person wants a For Dummies, 101, fast-food definition of what something means or does.
Thus we had ‘The World Wide Web’, then ‘Web 2.0′, ‘thin clients’ and a host of other watery contructs that now includes Cloud Computing.
Thing is, they still help explain an idea, even if it’s nearly meaningless.
In my opinion, Cloud Computing is no longer meant for us in the same way that “E=MC2″ is no longer the purview of a handful of physicists. Everybody knows what it means….basically. But very, very few people could get in front of a chalkboard and do the math : )
So yes, it’s a marketing term, but it’s also a translation for a bunch of complicated and interrelated concepts.
People want shorthand. I don’t blame them.
In a way, it’s marketing’s job to make something digestible — and thus sellable. So I say let this cumulous little catchphrase stand, even if we don’t like the rain : )

By: April

April — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:28:14 +0000

Thanks a lot for the smart comment.
Cloud computing as a term in my mind right now is a lot like “e-business”, “on demand” or even “Grid” when people first started talking about grids. It is not a technical term, it’s a marketing term which will ultimately be defined by the market. Right now there are a host of very large players trying to make their definition stick. Until the market settles around one definition (if it ever does), “cloud computing” will mean whatever you want it to mean. If Oracle has its way then the term will either go away or become synonymous with “Grid”.

By: Ubergeeken

Ubergeeken — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:57:33 +0000

Again April, another great topic!
To me, “Cloud Computing” is all marketing hype. What ever happened to thin-clients were to be all the rage 8 to 10 year ago or how about distributed storage where your files would be stored on other peoples empty disk space? They don’t work well if the network is not accessible.
My point? How many thin-clients did you see professionals use on an airplane? You still need local applications to get work done when not connected to the internet.
Who redefined network applications as Cloud Computing?
Accessing e-mail, performing database lookups, and storing files on a remote server are client-to-server processes. If this is cloud computing, it’s not new. The day two mainframes were connected and allowed the passing of data between them was the birth of this concept (45+ years ago!)
So what IS cloud computing?
When I think of “true” cloud computing, I think of what was called “grids”:
1) distributed software that is working on chunks of data or tasks.
2) the result of the tasks are cumulatively working to solve a larger equation.
3) the results are reported back to a server that originated the request.
An example of grid/cloud computing:
I downloaded a program from grid.org to offer CPU cycles for their cancer research program. The “cloud” was solving a problem as a super-set of smaller calculations. the research program would run in the background or when the PC is idle and only needed to connect to the network to get new instructions and provide the results of the calculations.
Another example of cloud computing that we engineering and security folks cringe at – BOT-NETS! Now THAT’S cloud computing!
Cloud-computing re-redefined:
Clients access servers which accept control instructions. The servers break the instructions into individual tasks. Other client on the cloud are handed a task to complete. The clients complete the tasks and relay results to the server. The server collects all tasks and reports the results back to the original client. the results are received from the cloud faster than if they were processed by a single PC or even a group of servers.
U_Geek_N