Everybody and their grandmother has heard about the Sidekick fiasco over the past month. Apparently the storage servers for the Sidekick mobile service had a bad day and Microsoft had trouble restoring customer data. The whole episode became a lead-in for a series of stories detailing potential disasters in the cloud. You see, if Sidekick has a bad week then maybe this whole cloud computing thingy is dangerous.

The media hyped up the notion that the Sidekick service represents cloud computing. Let me get this straight. So any online service that stores customer data is now considered cloud computing? This hype makes me want to drink heavily and find the keys to the nearest backhoe. Are interesting news articles such a rarity these days that journalists have resorted to this level of desperation? We stored customer data on the Internet a generation ago. It wasn’t cloud computing back then and it isn’t cloud computing now. So what is it? It’s (drum roll please…) just simply storing and accessing data via the Internet. Yeah, kind of boring isn’t it? I guess that level of banality doesn’t generate clicks and advertising dollars.