Cloud Gadgets: When Marketing Hype Takes Over
In a move reminiscent of ye olde netbook computer, in an effort to boost what would otherwise be considered products that are dead on arrival in the wake of the popularity of things as diverse as Amazon's AWS, cloud hosting or the iPad, new products are being touted as things made for or very suitable for accessing the Cloud.
These are mostly hype-requiring devices but do serve the promise of the Cloud, a dream as old as the Internet itself: to be able to do stuff wherever you are, as conveniently and widely available as possible.
Google's Chromebooks, Samsung Series 5 Chromebooks, and Acer's Chromia, for example, offer the long-forgotten dream of a web-made machine. While the jury's still out on their success in being offered as Cloud machines, they do have the benefit of being hedged as useful tools for corporate IT departments.
Then there are today's other hot items: iPads-- i mean, tablets. The jury's still out on this one although you'd be forgiven to believe Apple's iPad rules this and many succeeding rounds to come. Everyone from no-name Chinese contractors to big names like RIM (Playbook), Motorola (Xoom) and Samsung (Galaxy Tab) have an Android-based tablet offering; while other big names like Microsoft, Nokia and HP moving mountains for their own Windows or proprietary offerings. However, if you are a new entrant (like say, Panasonic?), how can you differentiate yourself from this sea of already large players? Why, you offer a "cloud" tablet of course!
Panasonic offers Viera "cloud tablets" to do what you think it does, tantamount to saying Toyota is offering road-based automobiles. But don't let that stop them.
On the other hand, iTwin offers a dto-peer networking over the Net between the two connected PCs to share files. If this sounds really old to you, it is. In iTwin's case, its devices create a "personal cloud' around a user's PC hard disk, forever throwing cold water on the very essence of cloud computing itself because in today's cloud-intoxicated world.
The Cloud as a concept is relatively new, considering its heritage (virtualization, load-balanced elastic services, etc.) is quite an old concept and actually varies in definition, with most of them failing to realize its real vision of being an amorphous, abstract concept intended to let organizations and people do things with an abstract concept instead of a wide array of specific equipment, sills and methodologies; and then access and do things with it no matter where they are and regardless of device to access them.
But as with any new concept that gathers wide appeal and buzz, especially something with a deep potential for the future like the use of the Cloud, the seedier side also exists, and in the case of the Cloud, it isn't just the security and other dangers that need addressing, but also having to swallow and live with the fact that there will always be those in marketing who will slap the name of the fashion item du jour if it helps put their names out there, let alone help sell their product in an ocean of similar ones.
As the examples above and many more besides provide, slapping the cloud as part of your product's moniker or marketing spiel definitely does wonders.
