Thanks to advertising from some of the larger consumer brands Cloud Computing is rapidly becoming a household name. And some are predicting the true summer of cloud computing is to begin June 6th 2011 at the NY Javits Center with the biggest Cloud Expo ever. Now the ultimate dream of any marketer is to have its brand become a verb: "Let me quickly Xerox that," "I FedExed it to you yesterday," or "I just Googled it."
In cloud computing I have not seen that happening yet. At least I haven't heard anyone say they "Amazoned" their intranet or "Forced" their custom apps yet. And actually that is a good thing. Because such unique brand recognition often comes with market monopolies and extreme customer lock-in. (Lock-in and how to prevent it - is by the way the topic I will be discussing at the Cloud Expo on Tuesday June 7th). But it is also unlikely we will be calling this new phenomena cloud computing forever.
After all, cloud computing is not the first new kind of computing. Previously we saw "interactive computing" - indicating that it was no longer processed in an overnight batch - and "client/server computing" -indicating it ran with a graphical user interface and not on a boring green screen terminal. But pretty soon the new way became the norm and we resorted back to simply calling it "computing."
For cloud computing there are basically two options: we will either call it computing again - meaning it is perceived as a slightly improved version of the same old, slow and expensive service they used to get from the EDP or IT department. Or users may start to use a cloud itself as a name: "Since we cloud our email, the cost has gone down considerably," or "Our new CIO agreed with the CEO to cloud as much as possible, and the results have been amazing."
Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating trying to repeat the oldest trick in the IT book of putting a new name or label on old ideas, like when we started calling everything e-something and we renamed our companies to Something.DOT.com. Some of that is already going on around as cloud washing (companies renaming their existing offerings to be perceived as cloud solutions, even if they have little to do with cloud).
Now it may take some time to get used to ‘clouding' as a verb - although often these words just happen, all of a sudden they become part of everyday language. What does not help this particular one is that - till now - the only things people clouded were issues.
For people that grew up in IT this idea of calling it cloud may sound silly. Why on earth would we use a new name for something that basically is computing as we invented it (or at least as we intended it). But it won't be the IT people deciding what to call it; it will be the next generation of users. The same generation that - at least in Holland - massively adopted the verb computering. "What did you do last night?" "Oh not much, got pizza, watched a movie and computered a bit." It's the generation that came up with verbs like texting, computering and gaming. All not very results-oriented activities, but that's not the point.
The point is that if it feels like traditional computing - where you depended on an IT department to get service and decided what you were allowed to do - they will likely simply call it computing again. If it feels completely different, with more freedom, more possibilities and more speed and agility, it deserves to become a verb.
PS Anticipating the popularity of "to cloud" a Dutch vocabulary site is already showing the full conjugation here. More than happy to - with the appropriate Dutch accent - take you through this conjugation during my Tuesday Cloud Expo session.
Interested in attending but not registered yet, send me a tweet. You can then also hear my colleagues Andi Mann and Matt Richards highlight Evolutionary and Revolutionary Paths to Cloud and cloud experiences from many others at the 8th International Cloud Expo.
The original above column was posted at http://itsmportal.com.