Larry Ellison of Oracle thinks they're gibberish. Microsoft thinks they should look exactly like Microsoft products but skinned in the Clear October Sky. Sun thinks it's still a jump ball and would like your input . Amazon likes to call them by their Web 1.8 name: Web Services and Google thinks of them as just another engine for developing "do no evil" ... meanwhile a bunch cloud-minding developers flame each other into vaporocity over a TOS that claims "clouds should not and will not be owned". And yes, vaporocity.com was still available at the time of this writing.
As with a lot of tech buzzwords, cloud computing is fast becoming the one-size-fits-all-goto phrase for anything tech. And indeed Mr. Ellison was right in pointing out that cloud computing has been redefined to include everything we already do. But he fails to grasp or at least acknowledge that it's everything we already do to the nth degree ( at least for all practical purposes ). And for a fraction of the price to boot! So while Larry contemplates changing the verbiage in some of his ads, us developers should take a page from Thorsten over at rightscale.com to figure out where what we do on a day to day basis fits in because the bottom line, literally and figuratively, will someday reside in the cloud.