set ourselves up to blame others

Clouds. Ugh. I’m still trying to slowly make sense of what the cloud is, but it doesn’t help that pretty much everything is being rebranded as ‘cloud.’ Once upon a time I thought cloud computing was sort of like off-loading massive computing needs to someone else (a lot like SETI only more commercial, or maybe more like botnet time purchasing?), I now may think ‘cloud’ refers to anything you use that isn’t in your pocket or on your desk. So does this mean Web 2.0 is officially passe and ‘Cloud’ is the new Web 3.0?

Nonetheless, some thoughts which likely illustrate why I’m not getting it…

– If an enterprise isn’t doing their IT infrastructure correctly already, they alone can’t evaluate which cloud vendors *are* doing it correctly.

– Cloud vendors aren’t doing anything magical that makes them far better than your own infrastructure.

– And if the ‘cloud’ fucks up, you can just blame them, right?

– At least you can see into your own operations. You can’t see the cloud ops. And at least your operations can care about your business.

– Cloud companies want to make money too. Which means rather than paying contractors to make your solutions, you’re paying another enterprise to create your solutions. So, what are you really buying by probably spending more? (answer: experience and blame shift, and experience is often what enterprises are avoiding paying for in their own staff.)

– Cloud, in my view, yields value in: 1) experience through repeating solutions, 2) internal scalability through repeating solutions, 3) and internal efficiency through repeating solutions. If you can provide solution A for company Y, you should limit costs by basically providing solution A` to company C, right?

– Cloud is basically a new brand for the software market, the web market, or an IT data-churning service (B2B service?). Absolutely nothing new, so pick your poison.

– While basic computing needs for enterprises are very similar, it only takes a few weeks of work to make their environments terribly dissimilar. This digs at the value any repeat solutions will have for different businesses. Something the service industry has to deal with by stacking experience, rather than pre-packaged products. Any developer creating solutions for multiple businesses could attest to this, I’m sure.

– And if cloud is a service, then it will always be pressured to squeeze 10 clients into the space where 6 quality-driven clients would exist. (*wave to Jerry Maguire*)