"Lately I’ve been hearing some rumblings during my various discussions around cloud computing. Some in the industry have been quietly saying the end is near for the much over hyped term. I wouldn’t go as far as to say the cloud is dead just yet, but there is a growing sense that interest in cloud computing, at least from the point of view of a buzz word, has peaked."
Reuven Cohen, Contributor, Forbes, 24 May 2012
Now something has worried me a little in how "cloud" has been approached is that it appears in most cases to be overwhelmingly oriented towards either data storage or as a mechanism for off-loading or virtualising IT infrastructure - in the latter case, not running your own computers but just running your computers even though they are virtual machines.
At least from the desktop or home user, cloud is little more than data storage, eg: Flickr, Youtube, and at best a simple sharing mechanism.
My personal feeling here is that we're really missing the killer application (not the killer 'app') that would truely start to liberate computing from being locked to a single computing element (eg: my laptop) or some super client-server thing into a totally virtualised computing entity with processes and data (or even information!) being truly mobile according to computation need.
One could argue that Google is currently providing something close to this, but I still think that the granularity and information integration needs to decrease and increase respectively to approach what I'm looking for.
Maybe there isn't a killer application...for example, the way the Semantic Web could become the killer platform on top of the cloud? In this sense then cloud becomes the killer enabler.
Either way, 'cloud' was always going to be a disappointment; or am I juts being cynical under a barrage of buzzwords?
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