Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has a sense of humor nearly as large as his astonishing $84.6 million pay package. Asked for his views on cloud computing at Oracle OpenWorld, a smirking Ellison reduced the concept to a thin sheen of windshield condensation.

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do,” Ellison said. “I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. … Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop? We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads.”

Really.

Well, for on thing, Oracle (ORCL) might announce a cloud computing-based data backup solution. Call it Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module or something. Offer it on, say, Amazon’s (AMZN) Simple Storage Service. The company might also partner with Intel (INTC) to speed enterprise adoption of cloud computing. That is, if it hasn’t done that already …

Which is really just a grotesquely long-winded way of saying that AT&T is joining the burgeoning market of cloud-computing service providers. Like Google (GOOG), IBM (IBM), and Amazon.com (AMZN) before it, the company is offering computer networking and storage delivered over the Internet, on demand. But with one important advantage: AT&T (T) runs the backbone network that will connect its customers to those services. Presumably, that means one fewer potential failure point–a compelling proposition, especially for businesses that have suffered through Amazon’s Simple Storage Service outages.

Which is really just a grotesquely long-winded way of saying that AT&T is joining the burgeoning market of cloud-computing service providers. Like Google (GOOG), IBM (IBM), and Amazon.com (AMZN) before it, the company is offering computer networking and storage delivered over the Internet, on demand. But with one important advantage: AT&T (T) runs the backbone network that will connect its customers to those services. Presumably, that means one fewer potential failure point–a compelling proposition, especially for businesses that have suffered through Amazon’s Simple Storage Service outages.

The S3 service is great but this just proves you can’t rely on it, this is a major issue especially since it’s been down for so long. Way to go Amazon.”

–a post on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service forum

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) suffered a “massive” outage this morning, impacting a number of businesses that rely on the cloud-based storage service. Twitter, Tumblr and AdaptiveBlue were among the more widely known services to be affected, although there were many others. “Amazing how many of the services I use are reliant on S3,” venture capitalist Fred Wilson Twittered this morning. “Stuff is broken everywhere this morning.”

Amazon (AMZN) was able to resolve the issue in a matter of hours, but its failure to inform its customers of the outage and its efforts to correct it drew some harsh criticism from users. “Amazon’s response was substandard in this case,” said one. “I should, minimally, see a message on the front page at aws.amazon.com when there’s a complete outage. Instead, I had to come into the forums to make sure it’s not just my stuff. Like others here, I have a massive number of files (probably about 125,000 audio files, around 1TB of storage) that are for various music libraries. So I have customers with sites that are only partially functional, and nothing to tell them. That’s unacceptable. And I know you can do better. I’m not looking for details of the outage, just an acknowledgment (again, front page of aws) and ETA.”

Said another: “It’s AmazING the fact of having no info on what’s happening. Absolutely unacceptable. Come on, people on this forum are all tech guys, so we understand that bad things happen from time to time. However, you MUST be transparent with your customers and give them details on what’s going on (yes, we want to know exactly what’s happening and not a standard response like ‘The issue is resolved’). In fact, it is not. So please, scale these complaints to the right person and post the technical explanation of the issue as soon as possible.”

The S3 service is great but this just proves you can’t rely on it, this is a major issue especially since it’s been down for so long. Way to go Amazon.”

–a post on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service forum

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) suffered a “massive” outage this morning, impacting a number of businesses that rely on the cloud-based storage service. Twitter, Tumblr and AdaptiveBlue were among the more widely known services to be affected, although there were many others. “Amazing how many of the services I use are reliant on S3,” venture capitalist Fred Wilson Twittered this morning. “Stuff is broken everywhere this morning.”

Amazon (AMZN) was able to resolve the issue in a matter of hours, but its failure to inform its customers of the outage and its efforts to correct it drew some harsh criticism from users. “Amazon’s response was substandard in this case,” said one. “I should, minimally, see a message on the front page at aws.amazon.com when there’s a complete outage. Instead, I had to come into the forums to make sure it’s not just my stuff. Like others here, I have a massive number of files (probably about 125,000 audio files, around 1TB of storage) that are for various music libraries. So I have customers with sites that are only partially functional, and nothing to tell them. That’s unacceptable. And I know you can do better. I’m not looking for details of the outage, just an acknowledgment (again, front page of aws) and ETA.”

Said another: “It’s AmazING the fact of having no info on what’s happening. Absolutely unacceptable. Come on, people on this forum are all tech guys, so we understand that bad things happen from time to time. However, you MUST be transparent with your customers and give them details on what’s going on (yes, we want to know exactly what’s happening and not a standard response like ‘The issue is resolved’). In fact, it is not. So please, scale these complaints to the right person and post the technical explanation of the issue as soon as possible.”