The funny thing about cloud computing is that even cloud computing experts have a hard time enumerating the unique characteristics of the solution given this buzz-ridden name.  That is, software as a service, application hosting, web hosting, and server virtualization–concepts that have been around for more than a decade–are all ingredients in the cloud computing recipe, wrapped in the cellophane of Bill Gate’s long-in-the-tooth “utility computing” billing concept.

But the exact measurements of each ingredient–that’s where the experts start shrugging. And if the experts are shrugging at this late stage, then what SMB owner is going to pay the trend much mind, to say nothing of spending their hard-earned, highly-taxed dollars on the cloud?

“Well, these cookies look really good, but we’re not sure what’s in them exactly, and we’ve no idea how they taste.”  I wouldn’t buy one of these, and neither would you.

My definition of cloud computing is this: an unstandardized way to add computing power for situational, often experimental, applications over which the constituent has very little strategic interest or risk exposure.

That’s because cloud computing isn’t a well-defined, best-practice, productized, rigid thing. Indeed, from one cloud vendor to the next, the cloud is described differently.  One thing is certain, the biggest web service data centers in the world, like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, got so big that, one day, an executive walked into the board room and said, “gee, there are times of day during which our infrastructure is hardly being used at all. How can we sell our excess capacity?”

The whole thing kind of reminds me of the waste gas utility market, the highly abstract idea that places a currency value on “carbon credits”, units of carbon dioxide that are “spent” during the process of, well, existing.  That is, if you’re a company and you exist, you’re “spending” carbon credits. In the process of your spending, your purchase is a “carbon footprint”, a virtual shadow of all the carbon you’ve put out during your pursuits. Never mind that carbon is already being produced, or that the majority of its production is something over which nobody has any control.

Oddly, though, the paradigm of spending doesn’t even apply to carbon, because what you’re doing with these credits, in effect, is depositing them (not spending them) into a debt account. This is how nations handle it, anyway. This debt account follows you everywhere you go reminding you just how inefficient your firm (or nation) is at using energy (well, if your definition of efficiency has to do with co2, rather than producing something valuable for people, but I digress).  And then, to make the strange even stranger, credit traders can bargain with you for your carbon credits.  If your account is empty, they can sell you some of their nasty baggage because there account is chock full of the stuff.  How exciting!

No?

Is there one thing that this system does to actually appeal to the rank and file business owner? To somebody like me or you?  Or do we just look at it and say, who thought of this and what does it accomplish at the end of the day?

So we come back to cloud computing, whose definition is a moving target and whose role in servicing the needs of a small business is, well, unknown at this point.  Like the carbon footprint system that some have envisioned as a way of combatting global destruction, the cloud computing model asks us to agree that a problem exists–even if we can’t see the problem.

Right, you say, Ted’s just a small business owner in Cleveland. He’s taking a very short view of the matter. Those who wonder what about the ‘real’ motivations of the Kyoto Protocol and Cloud Computing must be hillbillies, right?

The cloud exists because supercorporations have excess computing capacity. The cloud is touted as a solution because those supercorporations want to make money. Those are two indisputable truths, and nothing deplorable about them. But the notion I hear repeated–that the cloud has specific benefits for SMBs–is not verifiably true at this early stage.  Heck, it’s kind of fun to read various definitions of cloud computing penned by the pundits.  Some of this stuff reminds me of teenagers getting caught red-handed pulling a horrible prank, but trying to explain it to their parents, to whom the explanation just doesn’t add up. What is the solution?

If you’re General Dynamics or Lockheed Martin, cloud time may be of interest and value.  But if you’re an SMB calling the line of business app you run remotely via Citrix a use of the cloud, think again.  This really isn’t anything new. Hosted apps and remote computing are far different in scale and scope from what Google and Amazon are shooting for with the cloud.

Google’s strategy, at least as evidenced by the proliferation of web-smart devices and software, from ChromeOS to Android to Google Apps, seems to be to create reliance on a sort of federalized computing utility. Had Microsoft been so obvious about their desire to accomplish this precise goal back in the nineties when the DOJ was heckling them for bundling Internet Explorer, they’d have never survived antitrust. Indeed, if Microsoft had been open about their plan for computing singularity back then, they wouldn’t be around today for us to feel sorry for them over how far they’ve fallen from the top.

Of course, by federalized, I don’t mean it in the governmental sense, but in the participatory sense. The strategy of driving all private computing to one or two meganetworks controlled by a few scrappy startups from the nineties a la Amazon (hey man, we just want to sell books on the Internet, you want in?) may have value to those who need the power of 2,000 processing cores simultaeously, like Lockheed, just as a secondary market in carbon credits may have value to people hoping to profit from eco-energy concerns, like GE.

But to me and you, the small to medium business owner?  Well, we’re still not convinced.