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Behind every cloud is an upstart computer company

Michael Antonoff
Special for USA TODAY
How did embracing the cloud become more than a metaphor for the impossible?
  • Typing %27cloud%27 into Google takes awhile to get to what you see in the sky
  • %27Cloud%27 now connotes %27cloud computing%27
  • Chart shows how the natural world%2C data-driven one stack up

How did embracing the cloud become more than a metaphor for the impossible? When I recently typed "cloud" into Google, it wasn't until page three of its search results that I found the kind of cloud you see in the sky.

Clouds were once an observable phenomenon, a visible mass of droplets suspended in the atmosphere. But somehow the word has been co-opted. It now connotes "cloud computing," or simply "the Cloud." It's shorthand for the practice of using remote servers on the Internet to manage, process and store data.

Oh, the ubiquity! What "desktop publishing" was to the '80s and "mission-critical" was to the '90s, "cloud" is to the teens. Pick any cloud type, and it's now the name of a company: Cumulus Networks, Cirrus Technology, Nimbus Data. A start-up that makes software tools for data scientists calls itself, broadly, Cloudera. Stratus Technologies doubles down, claiming that its "software solutions protect mission critical systems from downtime."

The headlines in business publications spew forth with abandon: "Music Moving to the Cloud," "Mobilizing the Cloud for Revenue," "Down-to-Earth Cloud Storage," "IBM Commits to the Cloud," "When Disaster Strikes — Communicate in the Cloud," "Your Movies in the Cloud."

The one headline I'm still waiting to read: "Climatologists, Resentful of Having Clouds Hijacked by Computer Industry, Demand Their Return." Heck, if I were a forecaster, I'd feel more outrage than the Weather Underground of the 1970s.

Even though he professes that he realized more than a decade ago that the phrase "cloud computing" would skyrocket, Darone Jones, a meteorologist and information technology specialist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Md., says he's still surprised by its usage. In thumbing through a magazine during a recent flight, he says he was startled by an ad in which the head of a prize fighter, whose hands were raised in victory, was displaced by a puffy cloud. "Don't get your butt kicked by the cloud!" went the pitch for services from a tech consulting firm.

Yet, he doesn't think the computer industry should be taken out to the woodshed. Cloud computing makes appropriate use of the word cloud, according to Jones, "because data is out there and builds up and can turn from nothing into a superstorm in no time. Both are scalable."

Whether or not you think Jones is just being diplomatic doesn't matter as much as knowing the difference between a storm cloud and a bit storm. To that end — just in time for this year's season of thunderstorms — we bring you the accompanying chart that, hopefully, will serve as a reality check between the natural world and the data-driven one.