No offense, but you run a company where you market yourself to companies, as a SFDC developer. You market yourself to marketers. That’s what you do. Of course you like “cloud”– it’s a misleading term that’s hip and trendy. It drives sales and intimidates those who aren’t hip to the techno-babble.

“Remote storage” is storing your data off-site. “Remote computing” is the same thing we had when it was terminals hooking up to mainframes. I’m not trying to sell anything here. I’m just trying to call something that is not new– remote storage and computing using third party vendors– what it is, and to suggest that the term might even be evocative of something with more potential to change current technology than the stuff the buzzword is currently being used to sell.

JP Seabury
Remote Storage and Computing Programmer

People say that the data is “out in the cloud,” etc. but that initial schematic your referring to was a reference to the path that packets take in getting to a known source. Knowing the precise path that data packets took to go from site one to site two was unimportant. Thus the cloud– it was obscured and unimportant. The data didn’t go to the cloud, it went through the cloud. To a very solid and un-cloud-like known remote site. The metaphor as it’s been used in the last couple years still fails as a metaphor.

And besides, if it was truly just that “cloud computing” was just use of that internet “cloud,” a lot of things that aren’t counted as cloud computing would have to be included. Nobody is arguing that ARPANet was a “cloud computing” system.