Ever since Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt publicly uttered the term "cloud computing" in 2006, a storm has been gathering over Silicon Valley.

Companies across the technology industry are jockeying to associate themselves with clouds. Amazon.com Inc., better known for peddling books online, began selling an Elastic Compute Cloud service in 2006 for programmers to rent Amazon's giant computers. Juniper Networks Inc., which makes gear for transmitting data, dubbed its latest project Stratus. Yahoo Inc., Intel Corp. and a handful of others recently launched a research program called OpenCirrus.

While almost everybody in the tech industry seems to have a cloud-themed project, few agree on the term's definition.

"I have no idea what anyone is talking about," said Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison, when talking about cloud computing at a financial analyst conference in September. "It's really just complete gibberish. What is it?" He added: "When is this idiocy going to stop?"

Read it all from the front page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Blogging & the Internet • Science & Technology

1. j.m.c. wrote: Does TEC have a cloud-computing approach to doctrine? March 27, 12:10 pm | [comment link]

2. IchabodKunkleberry wrote: “Cloud” ? Sounds like “smoke-and-mirrors” to me. March 28, 1:53 am | [comment link]

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