“‘The cloud,’ as a concept, may be all the rage in the technology industry, but consumers are baffled by the term,” Thomas Claburn reports for InformationWeek. “Research firm Ipsos OTX MediaCT recently conducted a survey of 1,000 American adults that plumbed respondents’ thoughts about cloud-based services. In reporting his firm’s findings, researcher Todd Board suggests that cloud computing is as alien to most consumers as the term ‘woolpack,’ an obscure word that, among other things, can be used to refer to a cloud resembling sheep’s wool.”
“‘When presented with brand names, nine out of ten consumers indicate they are using some type of cloud-related service,’ the report finds. Ask a Yahoo Mail user if he or she enjoys the cloud and chances are you’ll hear, ‘No, I prefer Yahoo,'” Claburn reports. “This perception gap is most pronounced with regard to email services and music services; users of online storage and web-based productivity apps mostly recognize that they’re cloud computing customers.”
Claburn reports, “The message for tech marketers, the report suggests, is to talk about comprehensible benefits and brand value rather than the ill-defined cloud. Apple, due to the strength of its brand, may not have trouble convincing customers to use its iCloud service. But the Amazon may have to work harder to sell its Cloud Drive, particularly in light of the recent EC2 interruption, the report argues.”
Read more in the full article here.
I am proud of my country and my heritage, but nothing about this is surprising. Average consumer has no clue.
The cloud is nothing new. It is just a term made up by both techno-egos and WS shysters as aarketong tool.
Most people are smart and inherently knOw that this is much ado about nothing. Apple should have done the updates this way a long time ago. I guess they needed to build more storage capacity.
A cloud is a symbol for a server in diagrams. Look at the patent applications and you will see it used. This is not some made up term for advertising.
The cloud actually represents the internet in diagrams.
I distinctly remember seeing many diagrams with inputs leading to a cloud image labeled “And then a miracle occurs”. I’m thinking it’s going to take Apple to make the flow exit that event on the True side.
Most people are smart?
Bwhahahahahahahaha. Good one.
I would’nt worry about it that much. Ask any normal American where Canada is and the usual response is either where is Canada or, isn’t that a county in Alaska.
I think you mean any “stereotypical” American. Any normal American knows where Canada is. The stereotypical, stupid ones are the ones who don’t know.
Kyle I think the stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. Conduct your own experiment with this and watch in horror as people are clueless.
Canada is where they burn cars and loot stores after 40 years of frustration, then go back to politely tolerating us jerks to the South.
I was going to write “Canada is where they burn cars and loot stores after 40 years of frustration, then go back to politely tolerating Championship Hockey to the South.” or some such thing… but, seems someone beat me to the punch.
You could also reflect on similar riot events that have occurred in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities…
Which is doubly funny since Alaska uses boroughs and not counties.
I thought they used sled dogs.
Isn’t Canada the place where they just lost the Stanley Cup?
Vancouver lost it (in more ways than one… if you saw the riots). Boston (which ironically has more Canadian players) won.
Yup…your Canadians beat our Canadians
I thought Thomas was from Michigan…?
We’re very sensitive about that
No. Canada is where the Bruins won the Stanley Cup.
Ouch.
To be honest you can find ignorant people pretty much anywhere, everyone has their village idiot.
Yeah but…here in the US we have so many idiots looking for a village. Ask the question, “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” and then you’ll see why. It’s truly pathetic.
That is so sad – mortally embarrassing really. Surely they filtered out some intelligent responses.
I hope that the rest of the world is doing better in educating its citizens. Someone is going to have to pick up the slack when the plague of ignorance takes down the U.S.
I blame the teacher’s unions.
It’s “teachers’ unions”……..unless you are blaming one specific teacher and his or her multiple union affiliations.
You must not be American, because that was a brilliant breakdown!
Of course blame the unions. Don’t blame parents for not noticing their kids lack of knowledge, or the kids showing up for school stoned. It could not be the conservative decades long effort to get rid of useless class like history, civics, art, and music; only fund English, math and sports. It could not be that the clip did not show people with the correct answers, or that most people were busy, and did not care about their answer that much. No it is only the unions fault.
I blame the Rim Playbook.
Honestly? I blame those baffling Microsoft “To The Cloud” ads. Those ads are so obtuse and unclear about what they’re trying to communicate, I think they’ve taken something that could be explained fairly simply, and have turned it into something most people now feel mystified by.
(Much the same way Microsoft keeps Windows users puzzled, scared and confused – easier to push ’em around that way!)
Obtuse and unclear like Microsoft’s entire business strategy.
Funny thing about those cloud ads, is that most of what they showed really wasn’t what cloud computing is at all. Streaming a video from your laptop at home? Uh, no, thats not cloud computing.
I blame Microsoft for the confusion.
They’re even more stupid because as well as being used wrongly, they’re using it as if it’s something are going to say on a day to day basis. No-one is ever going to say “to the Cloud!” outside of one of those ads, or when talking about how crap those ads are.
Actually, my friend and I say “TO THE CLOUD” on a regular basis. Partially because it’s ridiculous, partially because it’s true.
That was my thought when i read the headline. Microsoft has so confused the issue that non-tech Americans simply refuse to think about it.
Microsoft runs a series of commercials that make absolutely no sense, and do not demonstrate anything pertaining to the “cloud”. When the average consumer sees the commercial they assume that Microsoft knows what it’s talking about and that the reason the commercial makes no sense to them is that they are somehow missing some vital point. They think they don’t understand the “cloud” because Microsoft’s nonsense doesn’t make sense to them.
Exactly. This was more or less my mom’s reaction when she asked me about those commercials.
This is part of why Microsoft’s consumer-oriented marketing continues to fail – they can’t seem to stop themselves from making technology seem confusing and intimidating.
Exactly. My mom had pretty much this exact same reaction when she asked me about Microsoft’s “To The Cloud!” ads. I have no doubt they were directly responsible for her initial puzzled questions to me about iCloud.
The “average American” is quite easily baffled, just look in the Oval Office for proof. Nobody’s more baffled than that clueless wonder.
There’s no more concrete evidence of this than the years 2000-2008.
Except for his predecessor, who was, and is, clueless beyond description.
You are correct sir!
And the most baffling American compulsion of all: posting unsolicited and unrelated political opinion on a non-political website.
ha!
“better to be thought of as a fool than to open ones mouth and remove all doubt.”
Tell Rush I said “hi.”
How the hell do you compute at 30,000 ft without an airplane? what about those bright sunny days when their are no cloud in the sky? The weather is going play havoc on cloud computing.
Average American??? I was reading comments on Gizmodo from people who think they know everything about tech and THEY did’t understand what iCloud was.
But smart Americans don’t read Gizmodo (or write articles there, for that matter)…
Smart Americans think Gizmodo is some kind of porn technique.
Smart Americans wouldn’t read Gizmodo.
People don’t need to know what the cloud is. It’s a marketing term which is used in random ways, much like ‘digital’.
All that matters is what it does for them and people are smart enough to realise that documents which synchronise magically on all your devices is a pretty useful feature.
Exactly. The storage of data away from your appliance has existed since the mainframe days.
WS shysters are just playing with the teem so that they can manipulate stocks like amazon and find bagholders (most likely pension funds and mutuals) whe they clean up.
Don’t know ‘The Cloud’… That’s easy.
Go outside. Look up!
For many users, an email interface gets the job done whether it’s a desktop client or webmail. With a constant-on internet connection many are not clued in as to how or where their mail is actually stored.
Apparently a lot of people in the Googleplex think it’s stored up Larry Page’s ass. There’s a debate going on between them and the people in Redmond who seem to think it’s all stored in Ballmer’s right nut.
Apple was smart to make their iCloud service seamless to the end-user. You don’t go to the cloud – it’s built into your applications and your devices.
As a result, Apple will probably have a much greater success in iCloud utilization than Microsoft, Google, or Amazon.
“But the Amazon…” Most people would refer to the company as simply Amazon.
Hey, but any excuse to put Americans down right? If they don’t work in the industry or use a cloud service, is it really all that surprising they don’t know? People are working hard to pay the bills and something like this just doesn’t (understandably) make the radar.
This is (or should be) more about the failure of a “marketing” term.
Well, if we are going to talk about average American intelligence, we should start with the education system (and what a can of worms this will be).
I’ve been teaching since 1984 and, although my desires have always been to help kids be self-learners and ready for this “big ‘ol world”, the system is broken. I have more frustrations with administrators that are more concerned with covering their own ass (likely in political moves that would help them move up the ladder to some higher-paying position and parents that just want us to “fix their child” (like dropping your car off at the shop).
I love to teach. I love working with kids. I stress for them, knowing that we (the system) have failed to fail them when they needed it. Our system is against encouraging them to do hard things. It is against making them learn to write legibly, in favor of an attitude of, “let them express themselves how they feel best” and “let’s not hurt their feelings”. By the time they come to me (high school geometry), they still can’t add and subtract negative numbers, multiply fractions, and calculate percentage (on a quiz when they get a score of 34/50). It is frightening how the “buck has been passed on” so many times that we are now being forced to lower our expectations for graduation. If we have too many D’s and F’s, we are encouraged to “lower the bar” to make it easier.
As long as administrators have this tendency to move up the corporate ladder in public education, we will continue to have administrators that care less about the teachers and students, and more a out pleasing the parents and the people at the district, city and state levels. It reeks of politics!
(Don’t get me wrong, there are also tons of bad teachers out there, but time doesn’t permit me to continue this rant)
I know and have known a lot teachers and your comments jibe a lot with what I have heard from them. However such comments are nothing new and go back to long before you started teaching.
Also, I’d say that the educational system is more against encouraging children to think for themselves.
You can’t have a country of nice obedient citizens if they are capable of critical thinking. They tend to be dubious of party lines and rhetoric.
El G. and leodavinci:
+1 and very interesting thoughts.
The average American also doesn’t care about cloud computing, and gets along quite nicely without knowing squat about it. That’s precisely why Apple is about to win big. Apple will talk about specific things that make life easier and call it iCloud.
Is it cloudy today ? Are we going to get rain ?
On a slightly separate note, does anyone know if iCloud only works on a per app basis or are you able to access files created in one app in another? Basically, does it offer any shared storage, or will something like dropbox be the option for “power users”.
It’s all windoze fault. Throughout the years, windoze has managed to turn average people’s brains into zombie mush. I blame bill and balmer.
I confess that it took me a while to figure out what the “cloud” was. I’m used to military IT people talking about software being stovepiped and data being in buckets, but “cloud” had me puzzled for a while. Usually a metaphor shares attributes with the thing it represents. A cloud is vague, ephemeral, and wispy. Why would I want to put my data in something that can evaporate on a sunny day?
It was a facepalm when I realized that all it meant in plain English was storing data on someone else’s hard drive and accessing it over the internet. “Cloud” is the data-storage equivalent of a black box: we don’t care where it is, what it is, or how it works. We just care about putting our data where it’s safe and available at any time from any place.
Bottom line: “cloud’ was a poor choice of metaphor. Like real clouds, it fogs things up, so to speak. Eventually we’ll use it often enough that people will get it.
Apple will have more success with iCloud, not because anyone has a clue what “cloud” means, but because it’s built in, everyone is using it, and, whatever it is, it works.
A cloud is a symbol for a server in diagrams. Look at the patent applications and you will see it used. This is not some made up term for advertising. It may be so widely used, and understood in tech circles that they don’t realize it is confusing to the rest of the world.
Yes, the cloud is used instead of a box because there is no “one” discrete piece of hardware on which storage and computing is accomplished. Instead it is an amalgam of equipment that can scale up or down as needed. Amorphous, like a cloud.
Most things baffle the average American.
Exceptions are any sports played up to the professional level. And NASCAR.
@Wetfx: Consumers have no occasion to look at patent diagrams or charts with servers.
@Spark: Most people can’t understand what your explanation means, any more than you can understand me when I explain that an anarthous noun is definite if it is proper or if I explain that the archimandrite told the hieromonks what the staretz’s exegesis was, or if I explain that the diastolic pressure combined with the tachycardia indicates circulatory and renal failure, and possibly impending death. Not everyone is educated in every field.
@qka: Did I baffle you with anything I said to Spark?
I understood perfectly what Spark was talking about, in fact his explanation was one of the clearest I’ve seen. I’m not an IT wonk, I’m a person who works in the print industry, but I do have a deep interest in all things techy, so it was probably easier for me to understand. You, however, are just obfuscating things to be bloody awkward.
@Rorschach Of course you understand. That’s why you are reading this web site. It’s kind of self-selecting. But when you have time, run down to the undercroft and fetch me the green chasuble and the monstrance. And you do know what color the monstrance is? My point is that you don’t read web sites that would inform you about such things, and most people don’t read computer related web sites.
In the early days of automobiles, you couldn’t drive a car without a toolkit and a general knowledge of automotive repairs. Today most people have no clue what’s under the hood, nor do they need to know. One time the dealership told me I had skidded on an oil slick and broke the wishbone. I asked if I got my wish, but it turned out it really was a technical term.
Computers are about halfway there. The less a consumer has to know about computing, the more successful the manufacturers and programmers are.
it is amazing that tech writers and marketers need to be reminded that the other 99.999% of people don’t know or care what “cloud computing” means. They just want their computing devices to work so they can do what they need or want to do with them, just like they expect their cars, refrigerators, and other appliances to do. Computing devices are (finally) just appliances – thanks to Steve Jobs and Apple Inc.
6th Grade Science baffles the average Ammurikin’.
The do, however, love Faux Newz, pickup trucks, Bud, Country Musick – especially the cowboy posers, Gawd & Sarah Palin.
Posted from deep in Dixie-so spare me the charges of being a left coast elitist. I have lived all over the south and speak from 1st hand experience.
“…Bud…”
That says it all in one word. Anybody who drinks Bud and thinks Bud is beer is totally brainwashed. Bud (and Coors and Miller) use nothing but a bunch of hops steamed to release a bit of flavor and stirred into a yeast solution. The usual formula is one cup of dried hops per 55 gallon brewing vessel. These people wouldn’t know what beer tasted like if their geography grade depended on it. Unfortunately the advertising juggernauts of these purveyors of faux beer have convinced the Amurrican Male that it’s the real deal. In any other country these would be called “near beer” and calling it “beer” would put the brewers in trouble with the courts.
Every other country, bar none, produces better-tasting beer than the US (save for some craft breweries).
If you want to try a real “Bud” look for Czechvar (if you live in the US or Canada)
http://www.czechvar.com/index.html
Smart Americans? What about the UK. There are people here who are confused by fax machines!
[ x ] baffles average [y]
replace x with any noun and y with any group of people you care to identify, and it will still remain true. The only difference in [y] might be the attitude. Americans seem to have inflated their hubris to levels not seen since the Roman empire. we all know how that ended.
dumb headline, pointless article.