Time to retire term ‘cloud computing’

Grazed from USA Today. Author: Chip Bayers.

When we want to convey uncertainty or confusion, we often lean on words and phrases that make us sound like TV weathercasters — our outlook is hazy, it is obscured by mist, it is lost in the fog. Which makes it curious that vast swaths of the technology world these days are obsessed with marketing themselves as savvy about "cloud computing" — because nothing is cloudier than what the phrase itself means, or which companies are best poised to exploit it.

For example, last week’s enormous Dreamforce conference might have lead you to believe that cloud computing is all about what conference sponsor Salesforce.com provides: "software as a service." Beneath all of CEO Marc Benioff’s antic hype about a "third wave of computing" what the awkwardly-acronymed SaaS is about, in the end, is merely converting the inherently boring business software market from sales to rentals…

Bessemer Venture’s index of the 30 most valuable publicly traded cloud computing companies reinforces that view, since many of them mimic the Salesforce approach by specializing in narrow industry categories like property management, car dealerships, or vehicle fleet management. These aren’t Bay Area dynamos run by t-shirted 20-somethings — their CEOs are frequently doughy and graying, with headquarters just as likely to be in tech backwaters like Broward County, Fla., or the north Dallas suburb of Carrollton, Texas, as in the bleeding edge realms of San Mateo or Santa Clara or San Francisco, Calif…

Read more from the source @ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/11/25/bayers-cloud-computing/3696937/