Have you ever tried explaining what "cloud computing" means to a normal human being? I don’t mean those of us who work in the IT industry or in IT departments or who write about IT, I mean all those other millions and millions of people who use IT but don’t really understand it (and really shouldn’t have to either). By the way, I’m not saying we’re not normal human beings, or at least I’m fairly confident most of us are.
The reason I ask is because cloud computing is, to all intents and purposes, a term dreamed up and deployed by people in the IT industry without, as far as I can see, a moment’s thought as to what it might mean to everyone else outside it. And here we have a perfect example of one of the most common faults of the IT industry: using terminology, vocabulary and jargon that means next to nothing to the vast majority of humanity.
See, if I was trying to explain the concept of cloud computing to somebody in the street, the first problem I’d have would be with that word ‘cloud’. What on earth does that mean? Computers in the cloud, really? How do they stay up there? So then I’d have to explain that there are no computers in the cloud and when I talk about cloud computing I actually mean computing that isn’t physically where you, person in the street, are. What I mean is computing that can be accessed by you, person in the street, anywhere you happen to be.
"Right," he or she might reply, "and that has what to do with the cloud exactly?" Er, well it sounds good, doesn’t it?
Well, let’s stop and think about that for a moment shall we? Clouds. What do they do? Pour rain, darken the sky and block out the sun. Is that such a good thing? From a symbolic point of view, it does seem to be slightly anti-intuitive to name something that is supposed to make the whole world of IT a lot simpler after something that makes things darker.
And if you’re trying to reassure someone that their computing is going to be safe off-premise, do you really want to suggest it is somewhere up there in the clouds or ether? It can’t help that the adjective "cloudy" has such negative connotations not just in the sense of what a day looks like but also in terms of something being vague or indistinct.
Which, come to think of it, is exactly what the term "cloud computing" means to so many people outside the IT community. Perhaps, we should just rechristen it "cloudy computing".
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