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The Cloud – A marketing success for technology

In a conversation with a coworker the other day, we got onto the topic of “the cloud”. To summarize, it seemed the marketing genius behind ‘the cloud’ knew exactly what they were doing. From an IT Pro perspective, the sentiment seemed to swing drastically with just the change of terminology.

Outsourcing: “Booo!”

The Cloud: “Yay!”

Even servers in your own data center have been rebranded as “private clouds”. It doesn’t really make too much of a difference. The usual pain is just explaining what “the cloud” is to the business side of your organization after they get preached to about some product that integrates with “the cloud” which is no different than any other new product or buzzword.

For those getting sick of the term “the cloud” being thrown around so much, you can have a little fun instead. There are Firefox and Chrome extensions that use regular expressions to modify the text of a website you are visiting. Anytime a page displays “the cloud”, it will be seamlessly replaced by “my butt”.

You can get the cloud-to-butt extension for Chrome and for Firefox from GitHub. Alternatively, the Chrome extension received a little tweaking and became an extension available in the Chrome Webstore as Cloud To Butt Plus.

A group on Flickr was also formed to share humorous Cloud to Butt screenshots.