These days if you try to find news involving the word “cloud,” you’re more likely to get an article about cloud computing than you are finding a weather report. If the amount of news referencing “cloud” is anything to go by, the media has embraced this new terminology with open arms, starting in 2008.
Basically, the entire increase during the last two years that you can see in the chart below is due to “the Cloud” and our recent fixation with the term. The graph is strictly for news sites (i.e. what you’d find at news.google.com).
Above: Graph taken from a Google Trends search for “cloud”.
The all-conquering Cloud buzzword
It turns out that the Cloud isn’t even something new; it’s a prime example of a buzzword taking over the duties of already established trends and technologies.
- Software as a Service (SaaS) is now referred to as services “in the cloud” or cloud-based services.
- Utility computing is now cloud computing.
- Online storage is now cloud-based storage.
- Problems with Google suddenly aren’t server or datacenter issues, they’re problems with the Cloud.
In fact, almost anything that was previously “online something” is now “cloud something.” Ultimately, the Cloud has just become a synonym for the Internet.
So how did this happen? There’s a bit of a chicken and the egg problem here. Did media jump on a trend started by companies like Google and Amazon, or was it the other way around? Either the Cloud has conquered media, or the media has conquered us all with this new IT terminology that is reaching new levels of hype every day. The truth, as it often tends to be, is probably somewhere in between.
What do you think about this buzzword craze? Will the Cloud evaporate (pardon the pun) or will it remain with us for many years to come?
Suggested further reading: You can read about the origin of the terms “the Cloud” and “cloud computing” in the article The origin of 9 popular web buzzwords.
Photo credit: Clipped version of original picture by Sean McGee Hicks.
