IBM-led Open Cloud Manifesto: Who's in, who's out?

The Open Cloud Manifesto, spearheaded by IBM, landed today with a small thud - but it's the vendors left off the list of supporters who are making the biggest bang. Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com are all notably absent from declaring their support for a document that claims to be a “call to action for the …

[Doug]

lack of openness ..

'Steven Martin leaked details about the project last week, and complained about being “disappointed by the lack of openness in the development of the Cloud Manifesto”'

If the doc wasn't open, then how did Steven Martin get hold of a copy. And the writers do say this:

"is meant to start a conversation around standards and help clients ask the right questions about cloud interoperability. This document is not a contract with vendors or a position on what standards should be'

Now that the document is out; ather than attack the manner of it's aetology, what exactly does Steven Martin have to say about the contents. .

[Tom]

hows a company to make a living

if you use open standards - I mean the customer might go to the cheapest provider if we dont lock their data into our system. Or worse still they might read the open standards and use them themselves - then where would we be?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why with the bias?

Steven Martin made some extremely valuable points, most especially that it was at least a little ironic that an open standard should emerge from a closed process.

I will reiterate here that the main point that the absent companies are pushing is that the cloud is NOT about vendors or who is a 'me too' supporter on some silly six page document. It is about end-users and the developers who know what the end-users want. Most end-users dont really care if you give them an app built in Java or in PHP or in Python or in C#. They also dont care if its in your datacentre or theirs. They care that their day is productive and easy and that their software works and is available anytime, anywhere.

[Nathan Meyer]

Service Bureau Computing

Been there, done that. It's had a lot of different names over the decades, but the basic idea is to sell people more hardware capacity than you have. Which only works if a couple of them don't ask for it at the same time. So it works best with scheduled tasks, aka "Batch". Payroll and other back office functions. Just don't do it with real time transaction processing. Also works best for very small users; larger users generally find no real cost savings, and can get stuck with parasitic providers.

[jake]

Give it up, already.

What people are calling "Cloud Computing" culminated in IBM's SNA in the '70s. IBM milked it out thru' the '90s, but even by the mid-80's it was considered archaic by most.

I mean, seriously ... Purchase a PC with more power than an IBM mainframe of the mid-80s, pay for an OS in the purchase price, purchase an Internet connection for connectivity, which in turn allows access to all the free software in the world ... and then pay someone else to store your data & host your applications?

Who does this at home? Are they stoned, stupid, or both?

As for corporations trusting other corporations with data ... Get back to me when Amazon, Google, IBM, Yahoo!, Sun and HP are trading "cloud services", m'kay? Until that happens, this is all marketing twaddle, attempting to separate fools from their money.

Give it up, already. It's getting old.