That's a very misleading set of partial quotes to assemble in that order...
Ellison wasn't confused about any of the technical topics around cloud computing. He was complaining about the marketing trend at the time of slapping the "cloud computing" buzzword on all kinds of things that already existed.
This is a thing that happens in the tech world a lot, and it is pretty annoying. A more modern example is the over-use of "serverless" buzzword.
No, he’s not complaining about the marketing. He’s basically saying cloud computing is nothing, just a redefinition of existing computing. He’s not complaining about the marketing. He’s saying that cloud computing is only marketing. Clearly he was wrong.
Was he clearly wrong though? I listened through the whole clip and it seems like he was spot on to me. Steve Jobs made similar comments about cloud in the 90s - it’s really just mainframe 2.0.
No, cloud at root is dynamic on-demand provisioning. A lot of times SaaS built on top of cloud was (and is) marketed as cloud, without meaningfully offering dynamic on-demand provisioning to the customer, which blurs it a bit, but cloud had a distinct definition that was neither just SaaS or “mainframe 2.0” in any sense where using the term dismissively makes any sense.
Ellison wasn't confused about any of the technical topics around cloud computing. He was complaining about the marketing trend at the time of slapping the "cloud computing" buzzword on all kinds of things that already existed.
This is a thing that happens in the tech world a lot, and it is pretty annoying. A more modern example is the over-use of "serverless" buzzword.