Novelty is, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the computer industry’s oldest invention.

Perhaps the most important element of the deal lies in Sun’s potential for cloud computing. This emerging technology lets people and businesses buy processing power as a service, over the Internet, rather than having to purchase, own, and manage their own expensive machines. Cloud computing consumers pay monthly fees for services provided by companies that specialize in operating computers super-efficiently in vast data centers. “Cloud computing is a different way of consuming and delivering computing,” says Erich Clementi, general manager of enterprise initiatives at IBM, who spoke to BusinessWeek two weeks before news of the Sun negotiations was made public. “It has the potential to transform nearly everything we do.”

Emerging? Different? Transform? Rubbish. I’ve nothing against Cloud Computing per se[1]. I just wish companies, no doubt staffed by industry veterans, would stop pretending this is something new. It’s not. It’s just the 40+ year old idea of a computer bureau with a fancier interface, and less COBOL. Of all companies, IBM should know this!

Hopefully at some point we, as an industry, can acknowledge and celebrate the achievements of past generations, rather than denigrate and ignore them just to make our incremental improvements seem more revolutionary to the venture capitalists.

[1] Though I do love this quote.