Head in the Clouds - War of the Trendy Terms

As you know, Oracle put a "g" suffix on its last two database releases (10g and 11g) to indicate "grid." I had previously predicted that the next suffix would be "m" for mobile, but perhaps I am wrong. The new candidate is "c" for cloud.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about “cloud computing,” or the idea of moving away from individual desktops and relying on Web-based applications to handle computing chores. When compared to the once promising trend of grid computing -- which involves sharing the unused resources of many computers in a network to process a single problem at the same time -- cloud computing offers distinct advantages....

The big advantage of clouds over grids is its ability to support virtualization and Web service interfaces. Virtualization, which optimizes a network by combining its available resources, provides a lot more user control of both the computation and network facilities.

Ah, but what does Oracle care about virtualization?

Not that I really know anything about this, but I guess it's one more trendy term that I have to track.

I can even misuse it in a sentence. Ideally, I can misuse it as a verb, which is the best thing of all to do. One of my co-workers gets very irritated when someone says "I'll ping Tony to get the due date" or some such. Perhaps I should start saying "I'll cloud this concept with the systems engineers and see what happens."

P.S. The title's reference to "Head in the Clouds" is entirely non-technical. Head in the Clouds is a board created by Eddykins several years ago - a board with which I was proud to have been associated. It was kinda like the Scrine of its day.

P.P.S. Just to confuse things further, apparently cloud/grid doesn't have to be either/or, if you believe the title Ad-Hoc Cloud Grid Computing With Google Android.

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