I work in Pre-Sales for the European arm of a major Australian Telecoms company. What that means is that I spend my time explaining to potential customers why what the salesman is trying to sell them will solve their problems. On occasion I also have to explain to the salesman what to sell to the potential customer too. It is a bit like a technical translator.
I also draw fluffy clouds.
First rule of technical pre-sales: learn to draw fluffy clouds. If you want to talk about any complex system, it is important to abstract it in such a way that can be easily understood by non-technical people. You can always thin the smog a bit later but when you want to solve a problem, knowing exactly what size spanner the engineer will use is not always relevant on the first day. (Unless of course the meeting is about spanner sizes in which case it would be churlish to not mention them).
But Microsoft like Google before it has decided that we should all know about clouds. We should save our documents, email, photos, videos and anything else digital “in the Cloud”. Our devices be they computers, mobile phones, consoles or whatever will talk to “the Cloud” and share all this data. We can even share some of it with other people.
Of course Google and Microsoft both want us to use the Internet as the Cloud but more importantly they want us to use their own little bit of it. Google will be the bastion of the open-source, free Internet brigade whilst Microsoft will be the comfortable/safe choice for everyone else. (Please don’t write in with why one is better than the other – we just don’t know enough about them both yet).
For a journalist’s view on the Microsoft announcement, click here or here and start wondering about how much of a cloud you already have at home, on your laptop and in your mobile and how you would want it all to just work. You may soon get your wish…
