I don’t know if most people do this or not, but I always kind of try to do a daily check of whether I have become ‘this old guy.” (I suppose if you are a woman, it is much less likely that you ask yourself that question.) As in, “This old guy thinks Twitter is stupid,” or “This old guy doesn’t want to move all his clients’ data to the cloud,” or “This old guy smells.” I know from experience that things like Twitter, FaceBook and the cloud are scary to most adults over the age of 40, and I don’t want to belong to that group. However, I am completely unwilling to embrace them, because I grew up in the 80s and embraced things like rolled pant legs and boat shoes with no socks, and that didn’t make those things any less stupid. I fully understand what people are doing with the new technologies and apps and what have you, I just think that some of them need to be lumped in the same bin as the boat shoes. The technologies and apps I mean, not the people. I seldom put actual people into bins of any sort.

So, for the cloud, I have a harder time defining the line between my general crotchitiness and my genuine distrust of things. I can see many benefits to storing things in and running applications from the cloud, but I can also see some issues, just like everybody else. But what really bugs me is that no one really understands what the cloud is. Smart people. People I like. One of the companies I work for is considering starting to store some documents with a database provider they use. (They are starting to consider this WITHOUT EVEN INVOLVING I.T., which might be my bigger issue) I brought up the fact that, deciding to send files outside the front door might mean having to get and pay for a bigger door. And people did not know why. That is kind of when it occurred to me that many people don’t understand where the cloud is. Everyone understands that the Internet is outside the door, and the cloud is really just the internet (as far as most people would be concerned) at this point, but people apparently don’t get that.

So, I have decide to channel my ire at the people who coined the term “the cloud” or “cloud computing.” I’m looking at you, M.I.T. nerds… or some guys in a business park in Houston… or Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Well, whoever did it, thanks a lot. You’ve confused most of the people I work with.

So, Google needs to get its act together. Anyone who supports Android devices in a Microsoft Exchange environment has to hate them. I have no idea if Ice Cream Sandwich, or possibly the upcoming Fudgesicle release, or even the rumored Bomb Pop OS revamp will have a better integrated mail app, but the phones and tablets I get to see have a stupid broken one that sometime works, sometimes doesn’t and sometimes does and then later doesn’t. I end up having to buy a third-party app to consistently connect to Exchange servers. We have Exchange 2003, 2007 BPOS and 365 environments, and the Android phones are hit and miss in all of them. iPhones are great – have been for years. New Windows phones are great too. And, I have to think that has to do with the amount of control Apple and Microsoft have over their respective phone/OS combos. I have not been a huge fan of companies exerting the type of control that Apple does over everything, I guess kind of from a philosophical perspective. But when it comes to phones, I can drop my philosophy. A phone is an appliance, kind of like a toaster – at least more so than a computer. Apple and Microsoft give us a toaster and tell us to make toast with it. Google gives us a metal box and some wires and tells us to string the wires inside the box, then make toast. Actually, this is a horrible analogy and I don’t want to continue with it. How about this: Apple and Microsoft provide a fully-assembled P51 Mustang, and Google gives us the kit. And sometimes, when we put the kit together, the glue fumes are too much, and the model looks kinda funny when we are done. No, this is also an obscure and weird analogy. You know, I guess I am going to leave the analogies up to the reader(s) and just stop typing.

I just read the following on eWeek.com:

Nokia is selling Lumia 900 smartphones faster than it can sell them, Chris Weber, Nokia’s U.S. president, told PC Magazine at this week’s CTIA Wireless show in New Orleans.

I have to be honest, after I read that, I stopped reading, because there really couldn’t be anything more stunning that what had already been said. Now, I will admit, I like Windows Phone – I really do. I think Windows phones are the best option out there right now, kinda even edging out the iPhone. But who cares? Not only, who cares what I think about Windows or any other phones, but who cares about anything else other than THE NEWLY DISCOVERED ABILITY TO SELL THINGS FASTER THAN THEY CAN BE SOLD!?! This Chris Weber guy, aside from being a pretty decent basketball player, has opened the door to untold wealth for everyone. I’m not a math wiz, but let me see if I have this right. Let’s say I can sell 100 hamburgers in an hour, and I make $1.00 per hamburger. That means, in the past, I could make a maximum of $100 per hour at my hamburgery. Now, with this new Nokia technology, I will be able to sell more than that, even though I can only sell 100. So, that puts me over 100%, which is impossible except in sports. So, and correct me if I am wrong, but if you multiply by something bigger than 100%, it’s kinda like dividing by zero, and you get some sort of error. BUT, if it is dollars, it goes to infinity or something, so theoretically I would have an infinite amount of money, right? You know, now that I am writing this all down, I think maybe it doesn’t make all that much sense. But don’t ruin my moment – I am going to go sell more of something than I can sell and see what happens.