My thoughts on cloud computing

Seems like every dropout asshole who was lucky enough to land a CEO job these days is talking about "the future" and where this wonderful cloudy technology will take us forward and make things magically work. Even Ballmer is banging clouds these days, which is kind of scary when you think about it. He messed up with Vista, so you can bet your pants the Microsoft cloud will be more like a smelly swamp than a clear blue sky.

Anyway, I wanted to share with you my thoughts on whatever is called cloud computing and how it may affect our customers who trust us with their most precious data and business processes.

The short version: cloud computing sucks.

The slightly longer version: this reminds me of the RISC / CISC debate many years ago where people would debate the pros and cons of processors using a reduced set of instructions. For one thing, most of them never opened their computer and try to actually spot where the main CPU was on the motherboard. Most of them never wrote a program in assembler language. Most of them could not even fully describe what a microprocessor did. But all of them could paint a bright future where RISC processors would allow us to be more efficient and do more things - whatever those "things" were - and it would be so great and so and so.

Cloud computing is simply the latest snake oil flavor for "luminaries" and sales people with mild mental disorder. It's the most up-to-date line of BS to sell you the same hardware and software that they've been shoving down the throat for the past 20 years. You can apply a fresh coat of paint on a clunker, it is still a clunker. It is just that.

Do you really think our customers want their proprietary data to float somewhere between Pakistan and China? What would be the impact of having your proprietary data into the hands of a 20 years old hacker trading sensitive information for a living?

Your PC is crashing all the time thanks to the sustained effort of those dweebs in Redmond, and those same geniuses want to catapult your sensitive data in hyperspace without a GPS.

Everyone who ever had a real job in IT can testify that sloppiness is almost a virtue, like things are all messed up and it is considered "normal". Passwords are never reset, access privileges are never audited, and expensive servers are always idle while others are always saturated. It's IT business as usual. And IT mirrors the human condition when you think about it. Cloud computing is just a positive imaging technique to cover all the crap and mishaps going on, really.

So will a fuzzy cloudy technology based on loosely-based relations will be able to address human sloppiness and carelessness? Ask your vendor.

Hitting That Sweet Spot

IT consulting takes countless forms thanks to the mindboggling complexity of technology and the people who build a lifetime career on it. You can be a middleware consultant and earn your living by maintaining crappy products whose functionality still eludes me. You can be a security consultant and write governance documents that have a close resemblance to a Danielle Steel novel. You can be a project manager and your job is to defuse political feuds going on between two groups. All this non-sense pays very well but - let's speak frankly here - it's not the Klondike.

There's a specialty in the IT industry that very few people in the consulting business can achieve because you have to be fairly crazy and probably delusional, but finding one is like hitting a home run from a financial standpoint.

When you're considered a "luminary", it means that your Kool-Aid has found its prime target. No matter how crazy you are, no matter how disconnected you can be, many people will listen to you and ask for more. Simply said, it's a match made in heaven. Of course some people who maintain a ground connection with reality will quickly realize you’re just a phoney, but those people are not my concern because they are not the ones willing to pay for a luminary.

I heard many cases where consultants came up with ideas that were simply nuts, I mean totally bogus, anyone with an ounce of common sense would have said that this was a road to fiscal perdition. But the customer found the idea so appealing that multi-million dollar projects where founded. The crazier the idea, the bigger the budget. Strangely enough, this situation occurs only with public customers, crazy ideas don't stick in the commercial sector – well at least not very long – ask those who worked at Lehman Brothers for examples.

Although it's very bad news for the taxpayer when such crazy projects are jumpstarted, it's tremendously positive good news for consulting firms because it means millions in revenues over the course of several years.

When the customer is hooked up on a delusion, the last thing you do is to wake it up and talk about reality, because at that moment you're killing the goose that gives you golden eggs. What do you do then? You jump into the game, talk the same lingo and offer new ideas to augment the flawed idea, because the customer will love you even more.

Have you ever had a close contact with a luminary? How did you feel afterward? Let me know your experience at fake mike at gmail dot com. May profitable growth enlighten your day.