By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
You have to hand it to Oracle’s Larry Ellison. He’s not known for being a blushing flower, and this week he unleashed a fine tirade on the computer industry’s over-use of faddish terms. Case in point: Cloud Computing. Here’s an excerpt from Larry himself:
The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view. Source: Wall Street Journal
We Say: Right on Larry!
I agree, it sounds like a lot of nonsense!
When cloud computing first hit internet news all that came to my mind was some of these various search sites for torrents or rapidshare… A lot of them have a feature called a search cloud where the most popular search terms are in bigger letters then the rest! Beyond that, I have no clue what cloud computing is.
I think there was a similar situation with “internet 2.0″ awhile back… I did a lot reading about internet 2.0 and as near as I could figure, it was a new feature of the internet that would automatically fill in form data for you! (name/address/etc…) Some web browsers and 3rd party applications already had this ability before internet 2.0.
I’ve yet to see any difference from internet 2.0 but I’m still using Windows XP. (it may require Windows Vista)
Before that, all the internet hype was about “rich media” and that actually had a noticable change on the internet… We seen simple GIF banner ads be replaced by things like shockwave/flash ads! That really annoyed the hell out of dial up users but broadband internet users barely noticed the change.
Well said LZW. PCs were like that too – they were called Multimedia PCs for a time, when that meant a sound card and CD ROM drive.
“Cloud computing” is nothing more than than the old VE (virtual environment) mainframe batchtime processing shell which has been around as long as electronic computing itself . . .
Cloud computing, to me, is having your entire operating system and program files running in a VM on a remote server somewhere where you do not have to worry about constant upgrades and software stability. The day to day maintenence of your computer is offloaded to someone else. You keep a local hard drive on your desk that stores your personal files, encrypted of course, and only when programs ask you, the user, for permission do they have access to your personal files.
That, to me, is cloud computing.
Note: This would NOT work with windows. It would require an operating system that was much more robust and flexible.
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The day to day maintenence of your computer is offloaded to someone else
We seen simple GIF banner ads be replaced by things like shockwave/flash ads!