Oracle versus Amazon

Just an observation. One of the cutting edge fields in the tech world today is the sale of cloud services. Even big companies don't want to have to own their own servers if they don't have to. Amazon and Oracle both own a lot of servers, more than they need, so Amazon and Oracle in particular (other companies as well) long ago started letting other major companies -- such as the credit card giant Capital One, make use of their facility.

Since companies like Amazon have to prepare for peak seasons, and most moments are by definition not "peak," they necessarily have a lot of capacity to sell most of the time. What began as an almost accidental sideline became an industry.

This is the sort of service, by the way, that somebody is providing you whenever you say that you've stored certain data "in the cloud."

I'm typing this on an HP Chromebook, which runs on google. Chromebook looks like a generic 'laptop' but its distinguishing feature is that it contains almost no memory, EVERYTHING is "on the cloud," including the word processing software.

This can be very convenient, even for me. If I lose this device, or it breaks as a result of an accident, I've lost almost nothing except the price of a new one (relatively low). There are no settings I need to laboriously re-create. Even my preferred screen saver image is stored in the chrome cloud . Hmmm, "chrome cloud," both alliterative and paradoxical. I like it.

But what really matters in the cloud services war are the business-to-business sales. Not little old me.

Amazon was dealt a stern blow back in July, when Capital One reported that it had been hacked on an epic scale. Amazon was the company's cloud host and the hacker was a disgruntled Amazon employee.

Even worse for Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft have announced that their clouds will soon become interoperable. One has to wonder how far the balance is going to tilt now in Oracle's favor.

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