Mark Ryland of Amazon Web Services made a fun observation at a Tech@State presentation this afternoon: if you add the word “cloud” to any technology marketing effort, it becomes much significantly cooler. Cloudwashing! I love it– henceforth, Epolitics.com is a “cloud politics” website.
“Cloudwashing” is a particularly appropriate phrase for technology marketing, since a bunch of the most-hyped tech tools turn out to be vaporware anyway. So if you’re at a tech conference or even down in the Metro at a station frequented by government/defense workers, keep an eye for gratuitous cloud-dropping in ads or marketing materials. Then ask yourself — does that product have anything to do with distributed, scalable web hosting, data storage and/or processing? If not, you may have identified a classic example of cloudwashing. Bonus points for anyone who snaps a photo of the offending advertisement and sends it in — just email me, leave it in the comments below or include @epolitics when you tweet it.
Cloud photo courtesy Wikipedia.
– cpd