SOA

It's no secret IT is ambivalent about cloud computing's potential to steal jobs and user loyalty. That's no excuse for sloppy security negligence of apps in the cloud. That attitude doesn't come from hostility; it comes from overwork and the desperate wish that something new could happen without incremental additions to every headache IT ever had and never cured.

Comcast's executives and its NBC subsidiary are hot for SOPA controls on Internet content. The company's geeks just finished a national rollout of DNS security, and killed a service based on the same mechanism SOPA uses for enforcement because it won't work with DNSSEC.

Facebook just added another security feature than may actually make its users more vulnerable. 29% of those accounts are compromised every year, though possibly only half that number are hacked. Still that failure rate would get any security geek fired. With real fire.

So many different computing functions have moved into the cloud that the cloud has begun to look like the computing industry, or a single data center, itself. The difference is all those pieces are spread out and owned by different people. At what point will it make more sense to start consolidating "the cloud" into something that looks much more like outsourcing?

Most surveys show cloud computing is catching on so fast pollsters and providers can't keep up. A new one showing users with little enthusiasm except for specific services shows how big the difference is in segments that aren't really part of one "cloud market" at all.

Amazon StreetView to ride panaoramic photo-taking trike down Amazon river, try to keep photographers from being eaten by anything endangered.

Microsoft debuts the revamped version of its cloud-based office suite, Office 365, tomorrow, with better admin/management tools than Google and a price that keeps Microsoft in the game.

Four-fifths of business unit managers said their businesses are so dependent on technology they can't serve customers without it; increasingly they're doing that via the cloud, not through IT.

End-user companies report an overwhelming disappointment in virtualization and cloud computing, expecting performance that's acceptable even if it never meets changing goals.

Data breaches shake confidence in the cloud, blaming it for security gaps between new technology, old security policies and a human tendency toward trust. Fix that and you're golden.

Microsoft is making progress on several fronts that had it stuck a few months ago, but big investors aren't waiting to see if those positive indications will turn the company around. They want CEO Steve Ballmer fired.