What I'm saying is that you can't justifiably say that it's "just someone else's computer" (emphasis mine). Just someone else's computer would be ssh root acces

What I'm saying is that you can't justifiably say that it's "just someone else's computer" (emphasis mine). Just someone else's computer would be ssh root access to a physical machine in some data center. No tenancy separation, no dynamic allocation, no exposure of failure tolerances (e.g. AWS Availability Zones), etc. To illustrate this point succinctly, there are probably thousands of "somebody else's computers" sitting in a dell warehouse somewhere that are no good to me. The cloud is only useful if there are additional services to help me consume that computer. I'm not saying it doesn't run on somebody else's computer. I could, though, since private clouds are in fact "clouds" that are not someone else's computer. Again, what I'm saying is that it is not a sufficiently specific generalization to accurately describe "cloud." The definition of "cloud" is fundamentally more complex than "just somebody else's computer."