Its not just us that think that Cloud Computing is a tad overblown....

...Larry Ellison weighs in, on the WSJ over here:

Ellison spoke for a few minutes about Oracle and his vision for the company before opening the floor to questions. The first one: What is Oracle doing about cloud computing? Ellison smirked and then went off one what might be the funniest ten minutes in analyst-meeting history.

Here’s a slightly-edited excerpt:

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

“We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.”

Couldn't have said it better........this is a classic example of semantic stretch, a term being pushed so far it ceases to have any meaning. The interesting thing is how far its gone so fast, the Wikipedia entry still tries to differentiate between Cloud, Grid, PaaS (a venerable 7 months old now) etc but the term today seems to cover any service you can think of over the net.

Update - Microsoft's Craig Mundie interviewed on MIT Review takes the industry line....but calls it a Composite Platform.