Selling the Cloud Sublime - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 88

one company, 3M, which uses the cloud to analyze eye movement so that
graphic designers can more effectively “grab viewers' attention.” One
might think that improving the delivery of eyeballs is not the most spec-
tacular example to lure people to the company's Smarter Planet strategy.
Nevertheless, it is clear from the ad that the purpose of the cloud is to
make everyone, everywhere, smarter.
Perhaps because it is directed at the business customer, IBM's campaign
never reaches the drama of Microsoft's “To the Cloud.” Yes, the hyperbole
is inescapable, with phrases like “sweeping changes” and “perfect storm”
and words like “reinvention” and “transformation” used again and again.
But the object is to sell intelligence and rationality rather than to create
the family that nature never could. Yet the message is just as profound.
IBM's cloud is not about emotion or empathy; rather, its SmartCloud is
about knowledge and rationality. IBM's is clearly a cloud of knowing and
other large cloud providers, like Verizon with its 2013 “Powerful Answers”
campaign, have followed IBM's lead (Verizon Wireless 2013). We will
consider the deeper importance of this view in Chapter 5 when we contrast
it with “the cloud of unknowing,” a stream of inluential thought derived
in part from a late fourteenth-century topic with that title.
Advertising is about many things, but one of the most important is a
speciic form of perfection. For Microsoft business customers, it is per-
fect power; for consumers, it is the perfect family. For IBM, it is perfect
knowledge and for Apple perfection takes the form of synchronized
harmony. Like IBM, Apple pitches mainly to one side of the business/
consumer divide—to the individual customer. Apple customers have been
in the cloud for some time now, but it was not until October 12, 2011,
that the company formally invited its customers to join iCloud. Prior to
that time, Apple subscribers could enter the cloud with an iTools account,
which launched a primitive cloud service in 2000. Improvements led to
the 2004 creation of .mac and that gave way to MobileMe in 2008. Many
of us who used the early Apple cloud found MobileMe, with the “.me”
sufix attached to everything, a bit hard to accept. After all, Apple had a
reputation for narcissism and what more mirror-gazing service can you
think of than one celebrating me . Perhaps more importantly, MobileMe
was plagued with glitches that prompted even Steve Jobs to wonder aloud
whether people would ever trust Apple cloud services. According to the
company's founder, people were justiied in saying, “Why should I believe