Cloud vs non cloud software sales
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@scottalanmiller said:
Cloud is something completely different. Office 365 for Office is not cloud, just subscription.
Because I can't seem to keep cloud straight in my own head - how is Office 365 not cloud?
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@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.
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@Dashrender said:
Because I can't seem to keep cloud straight in my own head - how is Office 365 not cloud?
Ask the opposite. How is it cloud. It is just a way to pay for services. Since when has cloud meant "a way to pay for things?"
If Office 365 is cloud, everything is cloud. Your car is cloud because you pay by the month, if it is leased. Do you consider a leased car to be cloud? Or an apartment?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Because I can't seem to keep cloud straight in my own head - how is Office 365 not cloud?
Ask the opposite. How is it cloud. It is just a way to pay for services. Since when has cloud meant "a way to pay for things?"
If Office 365 is cloud, everything is cloud. Your car is cloud because you pay by the month, if it is leased. Do you consider a leased car to be cloud? Or an apartment?
That's great, but doesn't help me understand what is 'cloud'? what makes one thing cloud and another not?
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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.
