When everything was "moving to the cloud" a few years ago (around when Jason wrote this), I started to have similar feelings. It all felt like something marketers were over-hyping. "Your computer in the cloud" (ever had a shell account that was your main system? This isn't new), "your games in the cloud! Ever played Nethack using that shell account?
I guess the only 'new' thing that I saw was the scaling capabilities based on capacity, but we've had time-sharing (albeit, slightly different) for many years.
My mom was a mainframe programmer and says the cloud it is just like what they had 50 years ago with timesharing but a different name. I just smile and nod.
Is such a statement much different than saying PCs are just tiny mainframes with a screens attached?
You aren't timesharing your tiny mainframe, so it is quite different, yes. The cloud is precisely what your mom had on a mainframe 50 years ago, including virtualization, on-the-fly scaling of resources (maybe a little more difficult because of the larger equipment), and even renting time on computers you didn't have in your offices, since not every institution could afford their own computer.
Both statements are correct. Remember that it was a personal computing 'revolution'. It would be a great step backwards to accede power to cloud service providers.
Computing at the whim of others aka timesharing.
Smile and nod but your mother has seen a few cycles of the industry.
Providing an employee with equipment (such as a laptop personal computer) to do their job is (legally) different than leasing equipment to a contractor, or transfer-pricing between departments in a corporation.
Remember that a timeshare was very expensive and that those costs were accounted for carefully not only for the purposes of internal billing but also for benefit-analysis.
The thing that annoys me is the idea that I should pay for a service that I've never needed so that I can store everything on the cloud. Actually, I should pay for three or four services. It's really not a good deal for me.
I guess the only 'new' thing that I saw was the scaling capabilities based on capacity, but we've had time-sharing (albeit, slightly different) for many years.