Too often, the hottest technologies ride on nothing more than hot air. Don't confuse good looks, marketing hype, or even dominant market share with value. Many of the most familiar, popular, and widely used technologies cultivate cachet they just don't deserve. Here's bMighty's picks for nine overblown technologies that just don't deliver the goods for business.
If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too? There's something to be said for that age-old parental admonishment when it comes to cloud computing. Every startup, from VC and media darlings to hype-free unknowns, has picked up the cloud mantra. And large enterprises with established, profitable on-premises software and services businesses are stumbling over one another to stake their claim to cloudiness (talking about you, IBM and Microsoft). But just because everyone's doing it isn't reason to stick your head in the clouds.
This isn't the first call to toss the servers overboard. That wolf in sheep's clothing has come and gone before with other buzz-catching names such as ASP, utility computing, and grid computing. At last check, most businesses still had servers and the ones that stayed in business weren't dashing to outsource the data, process, and systems they staked their competitive advantage on in the first place. The inviolate certitude of cloud advocates is now so strident -- not to mention the explosion of dedicated cloud computing publications -- that a backlash is inevitable. With the financial crisis separating the pretenders from performers in industry after industry, some cloud providers are bound to evaporate in the coming months, leaving business clinging to those allegedly iron-clad SLAs like so many worthless dot-com stock options.
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