This morning, while getting some exercise, I heard someone talking about donuts. "Donuts are a spiritual experience for me. I love donuts. They bring me freedom." I couldn't help but grin a bit. Far be it from me to challenge anyone's spiritual experience, but I think that there are some holes in the metaphor of donuts as a spiritual experience (pun intended).
The donuts got me to thinking about another of the metaphors I find challenging lately: the cloud as a metaphor for internet based computing services. I know that the metaphor was one of the most popular bits of IT jargon in 2008, that application providers are promoting their "cloud solutions" and that systems integrators are talking to their clients about "exploiting the cloud," but I find the metaphor lacking.
Finding the right metaphors in IT is always challenging, but we've come up with some good ones. The web is a great metaphor for the kind of semi-haphazard, semi-structured linking that occurs on the internet. Architecture is a good description of the planning process that precedes the construction phase of many large projects. And the now forgotten internet superhighway seemed like a pretty good description of the volume and speed difference we experienced as the internet grew during the late 90s.
Each of these metaphors offers some help in understanding abstract technical concepts in a more clear way, but the cloud doesn't do much for clarifying the concept of providing processing power, software as a service and the various Web 2.0 technologies (itself not a very good metaphor) that are often lumped in with the concept. Usually a good source for technical information, even the Wikipedia article on the cloud is thin. What does a white, puffy, floating coalescing of small water droplets have to do with any of these technologies?
The cloud metaphor seems more of a marketing angle, a way to sell more magazines, books, software and services, and not really a new concept. I, for one, vow to discontinue using the metaphor and to start referring more precisely to what I mean during discussions of the topic. If I want to talk about grid computing, I'll talk about grid computing. If I want to talk about social networking technologies, I'll talk about those. I'll confine my cloud discussion to the cumulus variety.
1 comments:
I agree with your argument. Irrelevant metaphors aren't a new problem... George Orwell wrote about it back in 1946!
Finding relevant metaphors would be a great service to IT and to the community at large. There's definitely a need for some good ones: it's how non-technical people make sense of a world which is increasingly technocentric. It's also a way to bridge the IT-business gap.
As Orwell said, "A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image". Who wouldn't want that?
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