Cloud vs non cloud software sales
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There are two legitimate uses of the term cloud, and only two.
1: Could computing as defined by Amazon and ratified by the US gov't. This is a term created by and defined by Amazon. It is solid and does not change over time. It is a very strict definition. The is where we say "a cloud" or "cloud computing."
2: Anything "over the Internet" where the product comes over the Internet. This is the use where we say "the cloud.:" It is just a fluffy marketing term for "hosted."
Subscriptions like magazines, cars, apartments, electric bills, water, sewer, software that own and other things have no association with cloud in any way in either term.
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I thought the point of the article - obviously poorly written - was to explain that in the writer's view the move from in-house solutions to someone else's house solutions i.e. what he calls cloud haven't been as epic as some have been claiming. He's basing this on the sales numbers from the top 3.
While i do believe that Google sells (or at least used to sell) an appliance you can put on prem for local search services, Google hasn't really ever had an on prem solution like Microsoft or the other two.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Nic said:
Give up SAM, the marketers have won
Cloud means anything that is subscription, online, or having anything to do with the Internet.Problem is, the article means nothing. Both sides that he is comparing are the same thing. So the article literally says nothing. That the terms are used incorrectly is bad, that they are used unpredictably and undecipherably even from context makes it totally worthless. Literally, it says nothing at all.
Marketing is all about meaning nothing!
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@scottalanmiller said:
There are two legitimate uses of the term cloud, and only two.
1: Could computing as defined by Amazon and ratified by the US gov't. This is a term created by and defined by Amazon. It is solid and does not change over time. It is a very strict definition. The is where we say "a cloud" or "cloud computing."
did I miss where you posted what that definition is?
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@Dashrender said:
That's great, but doesn't help me understand what is 'cloud'? what makes one thing cloud and another not?
Here is the NIST Definition of Cloud. This is the US gov't but is simply them making Amazon's definitions completely legal and ratified. All major governments agree on this definition. This is the only definition that would hold up in court, should someone try to use the term cloud there. This is cloud computing, this is what made "cloud" cool.
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And here is the video on ML that walks you through the NIST definition to make it easy...
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The other definition, the marketing definition, of cloud is "the cloud" which just replaced "the Internet." The word Internet is replaced with cloud. It's a silly thing to say. I have email "on the cloud" or "in the cloud" just means "email over the Internet." Nothing more, nothing less. Just that.
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@Dashrender said:
I thought the point of the article - obviously poorly written - was to explain that in the writer's view the move from in-house solutions to someone else's house solutions i.e. what he calls cloud haven't been as epic as some have been claiming. He's basing this on the sales numbers from the top 3.
Is that what he was saying? I didn't see that at all. Nothing in what he said suggested that he was looking at things hosted in house and out of house. He seems to be looking at how you pay for software, not how it is hosted. But who knows, he never describes the terms he uses nor gives any indication what he might think the term means.
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@Dashrender said:
While i do believe that Google sells (or at least used to sell) an appliance you can put on prem for local search services, Google hasn't really ever had an on prem solution like Microsoft or the other two.
Hence why picking exclusively vendors that don't focus that way makes the numbers very misleading.
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Imagine if he had picked "only the largest software making in the US" to determine what platforms are common today? Had he isolated to that extreme degree he would conclude that software is never sold by subscription but is always made for the Mac OSX platform exclusively and that Windows is dead. Because the largest player is Apple. But picking only one massive player, or three really big but related ones, is not a good cross section.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I thought the point of the article - obviously poorly written - was to explain that in the writer's view the move from in-house solutions to someone else's house solutions i.e. what he calls cloud haven't been as epic as some have been claiming. He's basing this on the sales numbers from the top 3.
Is that what he was saying? I didn't see that at all. Nothing in what he said suggested that he was looking at things hosted in house and out of house. He seems to be looking at how you pay for software, not how it is hosted. But who knows, he never describes the terms he uses nor gives any indication what he might think the term means.
I came to this conclusion because of this line
I had lunch with a friend (a seasoned IT professional) who decided to raise the subject of the ‘Cloud’ and proclaim the demise of ‘Perpetual / on-Premises’ software around the year 2015 (ongoing, I’ll refer to 'Perpetual / on-Premises' as ‘non-Cloud’).
Where he specifically says on-Premises a few times.
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@Dashrender said:
I had lunch with a friend (a seasoned IT professional) who decided to raise the subject of the ‘Cloud’ and proclaim the demise of ‘Perpetual / on-Premises’ software around the year 2015 (ongoing, I’ll refer to 'Perpetual / on-Premises' as ‘non-Cloud’).
Where he specifically says on-Premises a few times.
Yes, but he also uses perpetual which means something completely different. He's combining unrelated terms which either means that he doesn't understand what he is saying OR he's only considering small, overlapping portions of the market which makes no sense as the big market pieces are the ones that he does not cover.
On premises is not perpetual. Subscription is not hosted. Office 365's Office 2013, for example, is subscription, not hosted. Same as Adobe and JetBrains products. Or Oracle, or SAP. They are all subscription so don't fall into the on-premises/perpetual camp but they are not hosted so don't fall into the hosted/subscription camp. See the dilemma? No matter how he uses the terms, his article makes no sense.
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He says that he will refer to perpetual as "non-cloud." But tons of cloud servers, even cloud computing hosted IaaS, would be ruled as non-cloud then. His definition groupings are insane.
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So if we were going to take a list of some of the biggest products on the market today for software:
- Adobe Creative Suite
- MS Office
- Windows
- Oracle Databases
- SAP ERP
Just as examples.... which camp do they fall into? All of these fall into "conflicted" categories in the author's descriptions leaving us unsure whether he counts any of them as "cloud" or "not cloud" by his definitions or if he is dropping all of these because they don't fit into either of his made up categories. He isn't clear at all.
Imagine if he called one group of people "Group A" and defined them as "tall / male" and "Group B" as "short / female." Sure, lots of people fit those categories. But tons and tons of people are "short and male" and lots are "tall and female." Given that there are only two choices, are we dividing by height or gender when there is a conflict? Or are we dropping from consideration all people who don't match all criteria?
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Definitely agree it's poorly written.
I'm guessing, only guessing his intent was to say subscription itself doesn't matter, i.e. adobe Creative Suite wouldn't count because there is no cloud product, it's only local, and a single license used to be perpetual, but now is subscription.
I suppose Windows could be in either camp probably the same for Oracle and SAP, i.e. do you deploy in your own datacenter, or do you pay a monthly price to someone else to do all the work and you only worry about the data.
But I can suppose all I want, I'm not the author, so who knows what his real goal was.. and this confusion is why I posted this hear.
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@Dashrender said:
I'm guessing, only guessing his intent was to say subscription itself doesn't matter, i.e. adobe Creative Suite wouldn't count because there is no cloud product, it's only local, and a single license used to be perpetual, but now is subscription.
The problem is, he states that this cannot be by listing perpetual and subscription along with other details. So he rules out the possibility of either thing being what he said. He's stuck with statements that have no purpose or merit. Maybe he's confused and should not be writing, or he is intentionally trolling us. I'm guessing the former, because he comes off looking like an idiot.
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@Dashrender said:
I suppose Windows could be in either camp probably the same for Oracle and SAP, i.e. do you deploy in your own datacenter, or do you pay a monthly price to someone else to do all the work and you only worry about the data.
Windows, Oracle and SAP are all standardly available via subscription and hosted on premises making all of them commonly fall outside the scope of the article entirely. Hence the major issue. All of the use and have used for a long time subscription pricing, at least as an option. But we can't tell if he is unaware of this or is including their on one side or the other. We have no idea how he treats the bulk of cases. So his numbers are pointless.
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I hear what you are saying...
I just keep seeing that it appears to me that his purpose was to say that how you pay isn't really the point, yes the use of perpetual here confuses things, but if you drop that, the point I'm pulling him saying is that people aren't bailing on local installed solutions vs moving to someone else being totally responsible for the solution, and the end company only worrying about the data.
Using email as an example... he's appears to be claiming that no where near as much as we're made to believe are people bailing on Exchange completely under your own control, be it in a local DC or hosted in a DC but you completely control all aspect vs moving to O365.
I suppose for a windows comparison it would be having local (or remote DC again fully managed by the end user) vs completely moving to Google Docs with no local servers anymore.
But again, I can't be sure.
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@Dashrender none of those, as he wrote the article, hold up, though. In order to make his point he fails to provide support for any of those possibilities. He uses examples that make no sense. Office 365 IS on premises for Office 2013. So is he using Office 365 as an example of hosted or as an example of on premises? Because the only clear cut thing is that Office 365 always means subscription, rather than perpetual, but does not mean hosted rather than on premises, it does both of those.
Maybe he is saying that how you pay isn't point, but he sure makes a huge point of trying to make it the point, then doesn't support it in any way and comingles it with how things are hosted.
I think the only thing to be gleaned from the article is that the author has no clue and likely his point, whatever it may have been, is likely invalid or he would not have had to have tried so hard.
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Do you see O365 more about getting Office 2013 on your local machine or more about email and sharepoint? If you leave the local install of Office out of the equation it's completely a cloud based solution (i.e. on the internet).
