I've long been impressed by the cancerous power technical terms have when they become fashionable. "The Cloud" and "Virtualization" appear to be setting new records for meaningless ubiquity in a crowded field.
Setting new Records
When terms like Cloud and Virtualization appear in Dilbert, it's like getting a "Best of Reality TV" award: they've made it to the rarified elite of complete vacuousness.
Technical Fashion
People throw around buzzwords all the time when talking about technology. It's necessary and unavoidable.
By some process that I understand as well as I understand clothing styles, some buzzwords descend below the level of providing a convenient short-hand for some well-understood thing and enter the hell of fashion. Starting life as useful buzzwords, they morph into buzz-fashion-words, lose any meaning they had, and become obsessions for everyone who feels they need to be touch with the latest stuff.
How the Devil Does his Work
There is usually a marketing side of Buzz-fashion-words. Perfectly useful terms don't turn to the dark side without lots of help. I would love to be able to channel C.S. Lewis and write a Screwtape Letters for Buzz-fashion-words, exposing the process of commercial interest and personal technical insecurity that leads innocent, useful words like "Virtualization" to be the "it" thing.
The Cloud
I've already talked about "The Cloud," the hottest thing in corporate data centers with the possible exceptions, of course, of "virtualization" and "Big Data."
The Cloud is an interesting case of a buzz-fashion-word that is like a magician's misdirection technique. The consumer internet has long since adopted a set of flexible, cost-effective techniques for delivering services to their customers. The people who work in corporations are also consumers, and are exposed to the ease and convenience of these techniques. They notice that consumer internet services follow different rules than the ones imposed by corporate IT, for example about the release process. They naturally wonder why they can't have the same. Over time, the wonder moves to requests which finally become demands. Corporate IT, years late, feels they have to respond. The result: "we are migrating our corporate data center to The Cloud." The Cloud, in this case, means "our name for what the consumer internet has done for years, but by giving a catchy, trendy name, we hope we'll trick you into thinking we're ahead of the curve instead of pathetically clumsy and slow." A classic case of misdirection by people who are anything but magicians.
Virtualization
Everyone knows what virtualization is. When I'm standing in front of you, I see the physical you. When I look at a picture of you, I see the virtual you. It may look real, but it's not. The latest in 3D movie technology makes such virtual reality more effective.
Computers are all about virtualization; computers are layers and layers of virtualization. The machine language of a computer is itself a phantom creation; the languages we write in all use a "virtual computer." The inexpensive part of computer storage, the physical devices, have layers of virtualization on the inside, and present an interface that the upper layers that use it like to think of as being "physical." In computing, virtualization is everywhere, and always has been.
In that context, what is this hot new trend, "Virtualization," that often appears together with "The Cloud?" I've gotten bored with torturing the people who use it by asking what they mean. Sometimes they mean a software product (for example, VMWare) or a Storage Area Network (virtualized storage) but they're trying to be fancier. Sometimes they mean "you know, that thing that everyone agrees is a good thing." You get the idea.
Technical Fashion Words
I've got to grow up. I've got to exercise discipline. Launching into lectures when buzz-fashion-words are slipped into conversation by innocent, otherwise intelligent people does no good. There is nothing to be gained by snarkiness.
I've decided to focus on the word "nice," a completely vacuous word signifying a vague, positive attitude.
From now on, when I hear a term like "the Cloud," I will translate it mentally to "nice," so that I too can smile and think positive thoughts. "We're migrating our data center to the Cloud" equals "We're making our data center nice." "We are experimenting with virtualization" equals "We're trying to be nicer and it's working well."
What's not to like? Isn't that nice?
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