The Cloud: A floor wax and a dessert topping
I was sitting in a meeting the other day with CIO and the VP of marketing. The topic de jure was a new customer-facing mobile app the marketing team wanted yesterday. 30 seconds into the meeting, without even broaching the subject of what the app was actually supposed to do or who it was for, the VP of marketing handed me a survey and insisted the app “run in the cloud” because that’s what the users expected.
Before the shock even had time to form on my face, the CIO chimed in: “Yes! It’s all OPEX and we can have approval this afternoon.”
The remaining meeting was “cloud this” and “cloud that” and all around conviviality (which in itself was unusual because the two pretty much hated each other). But about half-way in I realized these two were using the same term (“the cloud”), but were talking about two completely different things.
And then it struck me… they weren’t alone.
If you talk to CIOs and the folks who spend IT dollars, “the cloud” is about cheap, on-demand capacity. It’s the Amazon Cloud. Pay a few pesos a month and get a server. And when you stop needed it, give it back. Need more capacity? Buy more — and then provision the capacity on the fly.
But when you’re talking with the rest of the universe, “the cloud” is where we keep things. It’s the Dropbox Cloud. And unless you’re a data hoarder, it’s essentially free.
A floor wax (Amazon Cloud) and a dessert topping (Dropbox Cloud).
At least it was a pleasant meeting.
-Stix
@mleetwo