The question of course could be directed to none other than Larry Ellison.   While Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff took the term and made it a cornerstone of their CRM marketing, Ellison and Oracle took umbrage at trying to re-invent an operating model he believed had been around for a while.

At the recent D10 conference, Kara Swisher interviewed him about this famous brush-off of the term cloud computing.

“I objected to people saying, “Oh my God, we just invented cloud computing,” said Ellison.

He also said that while he resisted the term, he did agree consumers and the general public needed a simpler way to understand and use computing resources.    He thought the term was overly hyped and very promising at the same time.

“People said the PC would replace the mainframe. But IBM still does mainframes. PCs are more important than mainframes. I would argue that smartphones are …