Why "The Cloud" is the bottled water of the Internet

I have been "on the Internet" since before most people had heard of it, and certainly well before the "World Wide Web" was invented. As a nerd, a geek, an early adopter and a technical purist (some would  - rightfully,perhaps - say "pedant")  I groaned when "ignorant " folk said "Internet" when they really meant "world wide web"...

It didn't take long for the two to become synonymous as the backwaters of the Internet wherein resided archie and gopher and ftp and smtp and pop3 etc were subsumed into the great beast that was "the web". "The web" -  where you could read email in a browser! And download files - from a browser! And....etc ....from a browser! OK, OK, I give in, I'll stop calling it the "world wide web" and start calling it the "Internet" just to make you happy even though I know it's wrong, but I insist on keeping that capital "I", ok???

What I will not do, no nay never is call it the fucking "cloud". And yes, I'm angry about it.

For one small moment after the execrable a*hole from marketing / sales invented this meaningless term (can you tell I don't like it, yet?)  - for one tiny, small, fleeting, worrying  moment - I thought "the cloud" was something new that I needed to know about. I had a huge technological FOMO experience and rushed to find out what it was. What I found was - if you'll excuse the expression - a cloud of obfuscation, buzzword bullshit bingo, marketing jargon and management-speak for (cough) - the Internet. Or, as I saw in recently in someone else's facebook post - in a rare moment of clarity for that platform - "someone else's computer".

Yep, that sums it up nicely. "The Cloud" is a salesman's invented concept to sell you access to someone else's computer that you don't actually need. To get that access, you use the Internet, but thats all too technical and and complex, so we jsut say "In the Cloud". As in where your head must be when  you buy bottled water.

In most developed nations, or indeed any country where the water is safe to drink, paying for bottled water is the result of a marketing man's greatest wet (literally) dream: Get people to pay for something they already get for free. Package it in toxic, planet destroying plastic, invent a sexy deceptive name evocative of cleanliness, purity (yeah those same requirements for the stuff that comes out of your tap) and charge money for it to gullible suckers who think it's different from the stuff that comes out of their taps - which is perfectly good anyway - when sometimes it's even the same stuff out of the same tap.

Yes, there have been several documented cases where unscrupulous* operator have taken mains water , bottled it, given it a fancy name and sold it at something like 10gazillion percent markup. The same stuff. People actually pay money for the same stuff that comes out of their taps. *It makes it hard to call such operators "unscrupulous" when the general public is so dumb and lemmingly free with their money...what next? Getting people to pay to wear your advertising logo on their clothes and shoes...damn, that ship has sailed...

Seriously, any time I see anyone buy bottled water I want to punch them really, really hard. I get a similar twitch when I see branded clothing, but that's less than it used to be.

Some may say that the music business are the kings of "reinventing the format" to make you pay again for what you already own - and that is true, but at least something has changed each time: CD was more robust and less scratch-prone and hissy, mp3 is waaay more convenient and portable etc

Neither bottled water nor "The Cloud" have that redeeming feature, both are actually worse than the equivalent you already paid for: either by pollution in the former case and massive security isses in the latter. But the principle of "pay up, pay up, and pay up again" is the same driver behind them all.

In the (g)olden days, you paid for a cardboard box with a CD and a manual in it. For "paid" read " often a very large sum of money" - but then you could sit back and use it for many a year. The provider could no longer milk you. Solution? Put it "in the cloud" and charge a subscription, now you are hooked into them for life. Open your wallet and repeat after me "Help yourself".

You would, of course, need to invent some reason why it was better - especially if it wasn't - but that's what marketing and sales are best at: fancy new names for the same old shit, subterfuge and glitz to part you from your hard-earned cash. Now you have been duped - sorry - persuaded to put your private data onto somone else's computer - sorry "in the cloud" you need security, privacy protection, backup etc etc all of which - of course - cost more. Its brilliant if you are a provider, bullshit if you are a consumer. Unnecessary, expensive bullshit at that.

A lot of brilliant, resourceful and respected people invented the Internet. No technician ever had a hand in inventing "The Cloud".

Remember, it is just "someone else's computer". Personally I prefer to keep my data on my own computer - its cheaper, and I'm not going to go bust or disappear overnight or sell all my data to the highest bidder or get specifically targeted by hackers...

"In the Cloud" = "On someone else's computer".