Doc Searls Weblog ? Bringing ?Personal Cloud? to Market

In Cloud marketing strategy: Do consumers care if it?s called cloud??Madalyn Stone blogs an existential question for readers of?SearchCloudProvider. She begins, ?Though the ideas behind cloud computing have been around since the 1960s, and the term itself cropped up more than a decade ago, grasping the concept of ?the cloud? still seems to be a challenge for many consumers.?

So, a few thoughts about that, which I?ll list and then unpack a bit:

1. The term ?cloud? is still new. As Madalyn says, it has only been around since ?06.
2. Its usage in marketing is almost entirely B2B, not B2C, much less C2C.
3. It has a technical meaning that is unavoidable for developers.
4. Given that early adopters will be technical, we may be stuck with the word.
5. There may be good marketing opportunities in the word in any case.

Many years ago I was involved an attempt by a bank in North Carolina (a ?cradle of banking? in the U.S.) to re-name ATM because it was a dull three-letter acronym and most customers din?t know what it meant. The name chosen to replace it was a good one, but the effort failed, because usage was established, regardless of whether or not people knew that ATM meant ?automated teller machine.?

I recall similar marketing complaints made early in the days of the personal computer. ?People don?t use a PC to compute,? it was said. ?Mostly they use it for other things.? While that was true, ?personal computer? stuck because it was already in use.

?Personal computer? also had a sticky irony to it. Up until the PC?s time, computers were big things only big entities could afford. That a computer could be personal was, in the literal sense of the time, kinda oxymoronic. Yet it became clear over time that personal computing would be far more useful for most people than the corporate kind ? and essential for corporations as well.

We have a similar situation with personal clouds. Up to this point in history, ?the cloud? and ?cloud computing? have been positioned entirely as big things that big entities have and do. (That?s why it?s still mostly B2B.) Yet, as with personal computing, far more will be do-able by individuals with their own clouds than is now do-able by big entities. So, whether or not ?personal cloud? ends up being a common expression, it?s important to recognize the scale of growth potential contained in the ironic combination of those two words. If it?s true that people will be able to do more with big data than companies can, the potential is very large indeed.

But it?s still early for personal clouds. This is why, while we need marketing thinking and language to talk about outcomes and benefits, we can?t dismiss the technical language that workers building stuff already use. Techies need a vocabulary to talk about what they do with personal clouds, and to describe it to other techies.. Some of that vocabulary won?t be erase-able when the time comes to name categories and market products and services within those categories.

Also bear in mind that, early in the evolution of any technology, most talk will be tech talk, because most work will be tech work, and most of the early adopters will be technical as well. As Marc Andreessen once told me, ?All technology trends start with technologists.?

We need to also bear in mind that many common terms, whether of technical or marketing origin, are not entirely accurate. A browser doesn?t just browse, a server doesn?t just serve and a client isn?t just a client.

At this stage ?personal cloud? itself is both very new and possibly not permanent. At IIW a year ago, Kynetx was still talking about ?personal event networks? (meaning what we now call personal clouds) and Respect Network?was talking about its trust frameworks. Now both are leading personal cloud developers, and positioned that way.

And, as more techies show up and start helping to raise the same barn, they will bring their own vocabularies and spins on existing vocabularies.

This is why I think it?s important for us to listen closely to the sounds made on the ground at IIW this next week. While we need to respect what the techies say as well as do, we also need to keep marketability in mind. To help with that, let me offer the social graph?as an example of Things Gone Wrong.

When the term first showed up, in this piece by Brad Fitzpatrick, I lobbied hard in Linux Journal against using it, and for coming up with something better. I failed, and ?social graph? today is as viral as a lump of lead. Even Mark Zuckerberg can?t make it catch, and the number of ordinary people who say ?my social graph? today rounds to zero.

Will ?my personal cloud? meet the same fate? I don?t think so, especially with its new logo, up there at the top. (From 99 Designs, btw.) But I also don?t know. Kinda depends on how good, and usable, the tech is.

Source: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2013/05/04/how-marketable-will-personal-cloud-be/

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