Small Fish, Big Pond

I agree with Larry Ellison about the misuse of “Cloud Computing” as a buzzword (my older posts here and here).

99% of what people mention as “Cloud Computing” is nothing more than Web 2.0, which is not anything more than crunching normal data and putting it online in a simple website.

Just about anything people claim is “cloud” based already existed on the web long before this buzzword came up. Spotify “Puts music in the cloud”, never mind that they do the same thing that last.fm has done for 6 years, never mind that all last.fm does is stream music to you which RealPlayer has done since the late 90’s, never mind that Realplayer is just using the UDP portion of the TCP protocol that has been around since the 70’s.

So what we have is files stored on remote servers that are sent to a user?
What a novel idea! What do you think webpages are?

Even Web 2.0 was a better buzzword because at least then companies were taking massive user input, crunching the data on their servers and feeding it back to the users, it was a process of making better use of the web, but even then it wasn’t a magic new technology.

The other use of “Cloud Computing” as a term is really just describing “Server Virtualization” at a datacenter, something that has been done for quite a while now. Instead of buying your own server, and renting out rack space at a datacenter, the data center is renting virtual server out to you with virtual storage and virtual processing for you to put your code on. The code and the service you provide to your customers is the same as it’s always been. The only difference is that you don’t own the equipment the code sits on anymore.

It’s like switching from 5×8 workdays to 4×10 workdays. Your company may get some efficiency benefit but it doesn’t change the fact that people working are still working the same job they did before.

Reading through the comments on TechCrunch I realized that most people still don’t know what “Cloud Computing” is. Simply put it’s just crunching some data and putting it online for users to look at (or what people were calling Web2.0 a few years ago).

Now that many people are surfing the net through iPhones and other smartphones they want to do things that are beyond the scope of the tiny piece of handheld software and that heavy lifting is being done on the backend. But it’s nothing new, it’s how Google Maps works, it’s the way search engines work, it’s the way anything that stream audio or video works. It may be more prevalent now but it’s not new.

And it’s not 100% online like most people think, it still relies on your browser and the java and flash (siverlight, air) plugins to do the front end computing for you. The only functions handled on the backend are the simplest database functions and data storage.

Take something like Mint. Financial reports are just basic excel style spreadsheets made pretty for you with some graphs. You can make your own by importing bank data to excel, uploading it to a public access FTP and getting a copy from any remote site you access from. It’s all existing, not to mention old, technology and ideas. It just took Mint to make a business plan to organize it all for you so all you had to do was look at a pretty website. No new “cloud” technology was invented or used in the process, just re-appropriating old technology in a new way.

Hence “Cloud Computing” isn’t a new technology on the internet, just an improved business model serving you the same data that’s always been there.