Let cloud computing remain clouded

An Indian TV celebrity, Viswa Bandhu Gupta, went viral with his pronouncement that cloud computing could get all messy when it rained. He has company, at least in a comic strip. Wally, the do-nothing character in Dilbert who is presented as an anthropomorphic graft on a coffee mug, tells his pointy-headed boss that he will not be available for some time as he is going to the cloud to fix some software issues there. More than Wally’s gall, what is noteworthy in this episode is the widespread misunderstanding people have about cloud computing. Software companies promote the confusion with their pictures of cute clouds, along with their offering of cloud-based services.

Ametaphor getting more real than what it is a metaphor for is not just clouded thinking. It is innately human. No ape or dog could get thus confused. And this is not just about human physiology, it is also culture. A moonlike face is not a thing of beauty to the western mind, but quite desirable, in Indian aesthetics. So, a benign, dumbed-down cloud should perhaps continue to represent remote services — far less dreary than the energy-guzzling, cooled concrete blocks in which stacks and stacks of servers work up heat doing the prosaic processing of binary numbers by the zillion that actually constitutes cloud computing.