I get pretty annoyed by its generic use, but I'm hopeful that we're seeing a narrowing of the term here.
Larry Ellison is right, we've had the "cloud" forever -- the network is the cloud -- but I think there's a good fit for the term "cloud" in the user space. "Cloud" describes a user experience. It's something that laymen can latch on to and begin to identify with an experience. While it abstracts detail, it's useful for marketing. The user may think:
"When I access Google Apps from this computer, my environment and experience are exactly the same as it is on any other computer. This is cloud computing."
The same would would apply for iCloud. Any device registered under your account works interchangeably.
Operating in the cloud means interchangeability of some underlying component that users are used to having to think about. E.g., "Oh, I'm not at my computer, so I can't access that document."
As an industry, we should try to narrow our usage the term to refer to services that deliver a location and device agnostic view of the entire end-user experience.
Larry Ellison is right, we've had the "cloud" forever -- the network is the cloud -- but I think there's a good fit for the term "cloud" in the user space. "Cloud" describes a user experience. It's something that laymen can latch on to and begin to identify with an experience. While it abstracts detail, it's useful for marketing. The user may think:
"When I access Google Apps from this computer, my environment and experience are exactly the same as it is on any other computer. This is cloud computing."
The same would would apply for iCloud. Any device registered under your account works interchangeably.
Operating in the cloud means interchangeability of some underlying component that users are used to having to think about. E.g., "Oh, I'm not at my computer, so I can't access that document."
As an industry, we should try to narrow our usage the term to refer to services that deliver a location and device agnostic view of the entire end-user experience.