Sigh... the term "cloud computing" never had a firm meaning. Or rather, the firm meaning was never what people (particularly those most excited about it) wanted

Sigh... the term "cloud computing" never had a firm meaning. Or rather, the firm meaning was never what people (particularly those most excited about it) wanted it to be. Basically cloud computing came about like this: 1. Software designers, network guys and so on have long used a picture of a cloud to represent the internet, some wide area network, existing infrastructure that needs to be ignored for the purposes of "this discussion". 2. It became common to draw services inside the cloud, e.g. dns, webpages, and so on, or as simple boxes just off the cloud. 3. Naturally people started referring to stuff on the diagram as 'in the cloud'. 4. Someone decided to turn this vague thing into a real term for his services, since they tended to be digrammed "in the cloud", (s)he called it cloud computing. 5. The english language, doing its thing, caused a vague term to be applied vaguely to vague concepts but retain a kernel of meaning. Now, cloud computing means what it always meant "can be drawn such that the thing I'm selling can be abstracted to a cloud". Seriously the reason so many different things are called cloud computing is the person calling it that has a particular view of what should be an abstracted infrastructure cloud. Looked at in this light it, the whole term has always been the same.