Survey Reveals a Majority Believe "the Cloud" Is Affected by Weather

SmartAboutThings writes "In a recent survey performed by Wakefield Research, it has been discovered that the majority of the surveyed Americans are quite confused about the notion of Cloud, when it relates to Cloud Storage/Computing. The most interesting fact is that 51% of the surveyed persons thought that stormy weather interferes with cloud computing!"

Comments

Re:I weep for my country

[CanHasDIY]

My uncle is a biological engineer; he was a member of the team who first managed to grow human body parts in rats.

I asked him what he knew about 'The Cloud' the other day; his response?
"How the fuck should I know? I'm a biological engineer, not a goddamn weatherman!"

In a saner world, our educational systems would teach science and technology...

You seem to be confusing "science and technology" with "marketing buzzwords."

Stop it. Stop it right now.

Re:It isn't?

[sjames]

Yes. The people who believe storms may disrupt cloud computing are 100% correct. Not only can they, but there is a history of it.

As for not knowing what the cloud is, I'd argue that they're in the same boat as marketing and the media that pumps out the breathless cloud stories 24/7.

"On Somebody Else's Computer".

[wanderfowl]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Every instance of "In the Cloud", facing a naive end user, should be replaced with "On somebody else's computer". This study shows that people have absolutely no idea what The Cloud is, and that might, just maybe, be affecting their choice of what to upload to it. "I keep our business records in the cloud" sounds sane, but “Oh, don’t worry, all of our business information is backed up on somebody else’s computer” doesn't.

Re:I weep for my country

[icebike]

In a saner world we wouldn't let hypsters foist stupid names on an entire industry for things as simple to explain as "remote storage".

Re:I weep for my country

[b4dc0d3r]

You seem to have a severely myopic view of what is important in the world. Until very recently, even cloud providers could not define cloud computing beyond whatever their implementation was. Not knowing what "the cloud" is does not exemplify in any way anti-intellectualism. I think your rant is a generalized one, way off topic, and pretty much a knee-jerk response to any sign that someone doesn't know about something you consider important.

Reading your post history, you realize that you are part of a small minority of people who are aware of the business behind service offerings, whether it is data mining of social networking or broad categories such as cloud offerings. Based on that reading, it should not surprise you to find that people don't care how their phone works, or what powers their website. And they don't want to know. Not because of anti-intellectualism. They just have no need to know, or don't have any connection to people who do know.

Sure they lack curiosity, but we can only say that about this subject, where they may have interests in mechanics or art or cuisine instead.

So you have rated your opinion of the nation on people who don't need to know about something, being asked about that thing, and making a guess based on the information they already have at hand. Or, you used this as an excuse to jump up on your soapbox.

Either way, you are my example of why someone should pity a culture, not the people who were busy minding their own business when a surveyor gave them a pop quiz.

The actual study has a much less exaggerated title, and as far as I can tell from the actual survey, it was a true random sampling. Ask a random person what "the could" is, given no context, and I'm surprised that only 29% said it related to weather. "51%" is described as "most", and as posted above that bunch of people are technically correct that weather can cause problems, including damage from lightning and flooding or just plain power outage.

The margin of error was +/- 3% meaning it could have been as low as 48%. You can't even claim "majority" with those numbers. And this was an e-mail invitation to an online survey. Automatically, anyone who clicked on an unexpected mail to answer questions is an idiot, but my opinion aside this is self-selection. There is no description of what measure they took to ensure the sample was anything other than "too stupid not to click."

So now you got your panties in a bunch over "People who think it's okay to click on e-mail links don't care how technology works." Which everyone here already knew.

Re:Satellite rain fade

[aurispector]

Or when people find stupid survey questions amusing and deliberately answer them incorrectly.