Today's complimentary "[SAAS_PROVIDER_OUTAGE] Shows Cloud Not Ready For Enterprise" story brought to you by eWeek: "Google Outage Shows the Cloud May Not Be Enterprise-Ready."

No, we're not really going to talk about math education here today (although this may offer some reinforcement illustrating the deplorable state of the American public education system as first indicated in this controversial post on H1B visas) but the inability to make basic cost/benefit calculations among members of the mainstream IT press regularly astonishes me. Or maybe that's just why they went into journalism in the first place.

By now you've surely all heard the basic argument from the article a million times: these wide-scale service outages indicate a basic lack of stability and character of unreliability in utility computing services today, such that they are unsuitable for anyone who actually needs computers to get anything done; in the same way that you see "enterprise-ready" as a code word on all kinds of products to signal their trustworthiness and virtue for all business consumers, it is used in this article to avow that businesses that aspire to success will want to avoid these upstart services.

"If your revenue is based on being able to stay in contact with people, and you have an outage, it can build to significant levels of damage quickly, so your tolerances are tight," Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group, said in an interview.

This right after the author suggests that SMBs are more tolerant of these services essentially because they can't afford anything better. Enderle goes on to say "The outages that Google experiences [don't] happen in a well-run enterprise" which may be true so far as it goes, but it turns out there are an awful lot of poorly run enterprises out there, because they have significant internal outages all the time; you just never hear about them.

At the end of the day, almost all these articles skip over the basic math that underlies all of these assessments of suitability and leave out a major equation: what cost the enterprise, or any business, must incur to reach the desired level of reliability in their services. eWeek in this instance does better than most, citing researcher Charles King suggesting that if Google, or other utility service computing providers want to reach higher reliability levels, they will have to pay for them just like everyone else (possibly raising their rates to do so). What they don't do, and neither has anyone else covering this that I have seen, is ask what the enterprise has to pay to achieve those same levels. And failing to ask that question, they fail to connect the necessary dots that make the entire topic worth discussing: dedicated, large-scale service providers can in almost every case leverage economies of scale to provide a given service level at a lower cost than a single business could ever achieve individually.

That is the essence of cloud computing in a nutshell, and no one seems to be able to do the math behind it. I tell you, I'm thinking very seriously about showing up at the next meeting of my local school board to protest.