(Pulls out soapbox)

Dell’s trying to trademark cloud computing, says the Industry Standard citing a trademark application that Sam Johnston mentioned in a Google Groups post.

Sam’s been watching trademark fury lately, mentioning that a limited trademark has also been granted for Web 3.0.

What’s frustrating for me about such obvious bandwagon-jumping is that many of these terms have been around for years. They’re concepts, not products. As an analyst, it’s already hard to say what’s a cloud and what’s not; trying to brand the descriptive terms does the industry a disservice and muddies the already, umm, cloudy waters.

Consider last week. I wrote a piece at GigaOm about component-based and service-based clouds. That’s two new terms. It took the always-sharp Lori Macvittie to point out another way of virtualizing services: Programmable networking devices have VLANs and Virtual IPs, but by letting users provision them through sandboxed APIs you enable self-service. Still not sure that’s a cloud, but it’s a great point.

And then I talked to another cloud builder using Javascript, which is naturally sandboxed because it runs in a browser. But give it some I/O, and you have a rather simple cloud (from the aptly-named www.reasonablysmart.com. And another cloud vendor or three going open source.

In the midst of all this confusion, when big companies try to claim a space, it doesn’t help anyone.

Here’s the only scenario in which a Dell-branded “Cloud Computing” offering works: A CIO reads a magazine on an airplane, and decides, “I have to get me some of that.” He asks his secretary to google the word, and everything points to Dell, so he calls them.

Forget the derision from technologists. Forget that every analyst has to differentiate the word “cloud” from the brand “cloud.” This kind of semantic land-grab appeals only to those who prefer their ideas bumper-sticker short and flat-earth simple.

So yeah, I think it’s a dumb idea to let someone brand an industry term that’s been in use for years. I also think it’s silly for a vendor who should know better to bother trying.

Don’t get me started on Web 3.0.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go try and make sense of five open source clouds I talked to last week. Or is that Clouds^TM?