The cloud is someone else’s computer

When a product says your files are “in the cloud,” it means they are on a computer you do not own, in a building you will never visit, run by a company that would rather you not picture a building at all.

That is not an insult. It is the useful part. Someone else keeps the machine on, replaces the disk, and answers the phone when the machine catches fire. You get a website or an app. They get a monthly fee and a copy of whatever you typed.

What it is not

It is not weather. It is not a mist your documents dissolve into. It is not automatically safer than a laptop. A laptop can be dropped. A cloud account can be guessed, phished, or quietly changed by a terms-of-service update on a Tuesday.

A short test

If you cannot open the file with the internet unplugged, it lives on someone else’s computer. If you can, it lives on yours. Most people want both, which is why “the cloud” is sold as a feeling instead of a location.

Call it a rented hard drive with a login screen. The marketing will survive. The sentence is still true.