The leap I am making in my little story is that one would stop to think of your personal machines and your virtual machines as "computers". Taken in the contex

The leap I am making in my little story is that one would stop to think of your personal machines and your virtual machines as "computers". Taken in the context of IBM's Watson's perspective at the time, he was looking at the computer as an enormous, extremely complex and costly purpose built device, for say, munitions trajectory calculations. How many of those can we sell? Now look at the "computer" as an enormous, extremely complex and costly purpose built device, for say, hosting all the applications made for mobile access. and the analogy holds. Start to think of your personal machine simply as a sensor (it senses and collects data that you produce, and ships that data to the hosted applications in the cloud) The fact that, itself, is a fractal representation of everything that is occurring in the cloud - that it is, indeed, a computer, doesn't matter. It is a sensor. A very powerful, complex one.