This is circuitous, but hang with me: Nick Carr pointed to a Larry Ellison rant on the hype around clouds in the general IT industry that was blogged by Ben Worthen at the WSJ. Larry apparently waxed honest during an Oracle analyst call last week
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.
Hah! Of course, I stand steadfast in my endorsement of hosted supercomputing services as a way of dealing with infrastructure contraints and availability issues. It’s fun when famous, rich people are curmudgeons — unless you have to work for them, of course.
Under the definition of cloud computing (very vague) wouldn’t his Network Computer fall under that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_computer