if you gotta beat on something, cloud is a punching bag

Good bye Web 2.0. Welcome back Mainframe 2.0, I mean, Cloud Computing!

The move to virtualize centralize has been brewing for years now. That includes the desktops (say thanks to mismatched Microsoft licensing and software upgrade durations and users who want to violate bastardize lose/bloat their systems). Terminal/Server is back in sexy! Centralized, to decentralized, to centralized, to decentralized…get used to the ride!

So, why is “cloud” so confusing? I’ll take a stab that doesn’t include the reason that everyone is using “cloud” to describe anything and everything (my toilet is Cloud-driven because it has a soft seat and flushes away my products to a central hub…)

Web-driven
The “cloud” is web-driven because firewalls tend to only be allowing 80/443 through with impunity. Make firewall requests of network admins? Security evals from the security teams? Move faster! Skirt any and all barriers security or business-related! It sure is easier to just pump everything through what’s open, right? In my opinion, that’s one of the only reasons. Much like a river carves a course of least resistence.

Outsourcing 2.0:
IT is painful internally. And costly. And often not line-of-business/revenue-generating. Homegrown apps just aren’t all that agile, and it takes a ton of experience and knowledge to create them properly. Internal IT is not all that glamorous anymore, but “cloud” certainly seems like it for now. Just wait until we collectively realize it is less agile/customized! Oh, and any advantages you thought you had in your technology are now a moot point; get over it. That or just realize you got marketing-fed into re-consuming the same old web you were using yesterday. Yeah, sure, those are new donuts because I say so (they’re taste stale because they’re healthy!).

Confuser Catalyst for all this:
The over-bloated web browsers, of course! They’re out of control and starting to get such a big head to want to be OS in themselves! Or at least try to pave the way for market share as they futiley attempt to flank the OS giants. You use the web and you like the web, so cloud / browser-OS must be good!

Leverage the power of Amazon’s computing cloud power all over port 80/443! Your competitor already does it, so we’ll give you a start-up discount and you can just use the exact same translations and maps and apps that we already built for them!