After reading a couple of blog posts this week, I came to a realization--one that I probably knew before, but was simply driven home by these writers. It doesn't matter what we call it or the technology that drives it, what matters is what people do with it.

The first post, from Rick Tucker at Doculabs, was called "No one cares about content management (no one who matters anyway)." It's a provocative title of course, but the point is that content management is an underlying technology. What matters to end users is that they can create, edit and access the documents they need when they need them with minimum fuss.

Those of us in the business who go to conferences and write about this ad nauseum like to deal with the technological minutiae. That's fine as far as it goes, but it's really not what life is about in the day-to-day world of the average worker who is just trying to navigate all of this technology to get her job done.

The second post was from Lee Dallas at Big Men On Content, called "What the cloud means to real people." Most people don't get the cloud beyond, as Dallas points out, Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) annoying commercials about it. The cloud is just a meaningless term until you can see it in action. Dallas gives a great example about how he can access a Kindle book on his phone, his iPad and, oh, his Kindle and pick up wherever he left off.

That's the beauty of the cloud. It links our content in a simple way that makes it effortless to go from device to device and have our content waiting for us. And that's all that matters to most users.

The Cloud is a wonderful term, but it comes down to simplicity and access and that's what we have to focus on. It doesn't matter that it involves complex data centers spread across the world or whatever technologies are making it happen. The only thing that matters is that I want my content and I get my content wherever I am, regardless of what device I'm using, so long as I'm connected to the Internet (and sometimes even when I'm not).

And I think these posts drive home an important point about ease of use over technology. As I've probably written here before, author David Meerman Scott is fond of saying, "Nobody cares about your products but you." What he means is you can give a laundry list of features at your presentation and the audience is going to yawn because they really don't care.

What users care about is doing their job and you have to present problems and solutions. When we talk about technology instead of real-world problem-solving we are the equivalent of Charlie Brown's teacher (Wah-wah, wah-wah) spouting meaningless nonsense nobody hears.

Those of us who write about, sell and help people implement these systems would be wise to keep this in mind. The laundry list of features and the the technological detail are all interesting to us, but in the end it's about helping businesses solve a real problem and helping users get their work done. And that's not terribly complicated. - Ron