Despite my best efforts to stop the practice of using such a phrase, I find people sometimes still say cloud computing is all about “cows not pets”. What they mean to say is in the harsh world of cloud you shoot the vulnerable instead of caring for them.

The truth about cows is the opposite, however. Ranchers spend a ton of money on veterinarian science and care about cattle health improving because if they can fix one they can translate that to tens or hundreds of thousands of others saved.

It’s a lot of money on the line when looking at cattle health because typically there are many cows to one owner, just like cloud but not in the way expressed.

The economics of investing to keep cows alive is very unlike pets where most people have a few at most and put them down before they’d spend $500 on care.

It’s a harsh truth but proof of it is in how little is actually known about domestic cat health.

Unlike cattle health being rigorously studied in universities around the world and funded for obvious macro economic reasons, researchers rarely if ever find a pet owner willing to pay for science studies that would improve the lives of cats… owned individually by other people.

Anyway, while the cows not pets saying drags on incorrectly in tech circles, I ran across a Cambridge lecture by Arthur Quiller-Couch in January 1914 (“On the Art of Writing”) that has a particularly famous phrase in it:

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

Suddenly a thought occurred to me… instead of trying to untangle economics about cows and pets I should instead propose people adopt this Quiller-Couch phrase to explain cloud.