I’m sure everyone has noticed that ‘the Cloud’ has suddenly become the flavour of the month, just like ‘Web 2.0’ did last year. But just like Web 2.0, the Cloud is a stupid, redundant buzzword that really means nothing. I mean, let’s just take a look at what Wikipedia says about Cloud computing –
The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet
What’s that? You mean that ‘cloud storage’ is really just internet storage? Yes it is – it’s exactly the same as what I’ve been doing for several year with some web-space and an FTP client. The Cloud is the kind of buzzword that marketing departments come up with to make things that we’ve had for years sound new and interesting again, and it really annoys me that it has crept into the vernacular of many computer users as well. I’m all for having backups on the internet, and using web applications (of course, most of the applications I use won’t be able to be run over the internet for a very long time, but that’s a different story). But calling these ‘cloud services’ or ‘cloud computing’ is just stupid.
