I understand why people are upset about the word. It&#x27;s misused.<p>But I remember what it was like before &quot;the cloud&quot;... You had to provision machines one by one, often via email or phone. It took hours or days. Billing was usually done by the day. It sucked.<p>Now you can just send a POST request to a machine and in a few seconds you have access to a new instance. You can send 1000 requests and get access to 1000 instances. And then you can send some more requests and only get charged for a few minutes of time. When this transition happened, we called it &quot;the cloud&quot; because it&#x27;s a big undifferentiated mass of computers. We could&#x27;ve called it &quot;the soup&quot; but we didn&#x27;t.<p>That&#x27;s what it has always meant to me. I don&#x27;t understand why people want to eradicate the word just because it&#x27;s misused. People misuse the word &quot;internet&quot; all the time, but I don&#x27;t think we should strike it from our vocabulary.