The concept of the cloud has been around for about half a century. The first known use of the term in writing dates back to 1996, when a little-known company named NetCentric attempted to trademark “cloud computing.” Although many of us had used the cloud in some way or another (most notably email), it wasn’t until Google CEO Eric Schmidt used the phrase “cloud computing” to describe software as a service that the term — and concept — really began to pick up steam.
Over the last 10 years, awareness and usage of “the cloud” has grown ..and expanded tremendously in our everyday lives. And while the term can mean slightly different things to different people, we’ve reached the point where at least a majority of us have some notion of what the cloud is and how it can be used to simplify our lives.