"It's great. (Except when it's not.) I'm using it already (only it's great)." Cloud providers will solve most of the problems I've hit over time. The hard problem I've found is that my data is on my end of the internet, my compute power is in the cloud's end. If I can easily get my data into the could, the cloud is great. If not, not so great. The internet is really compared to a LAN, so for big data it's often faster for me to do the chore locally.

to be productive in the cloud our tools need to be more efficient, I will need to program my front ends STILL inside the browser with AJAX ? Sorry but I hate AJAX, we need a higher level language tecnology if we need to work inside the browser . Applets are or flash (I like Applets a lot) are not a viable option so we got to install a plugin on client side, wich means that our cloud program is less portable, in my opinion if we keep the browser as a principal access point to the cloud, we need a general purpose compiled language integrated on it, no more AJAX mashups javascript html xml aarggg !!!. On the other hand there's another major Question, will the companies trust the cloud to store their data (hmmm...) ? Just doing a bit of brainstorming...

I don't think *all* apps will move into the cloud. Instead, *some* kinds of apps will move into the cloud (mostly commodity applications, I guess), and the cloud enables many kinds of apps/services/business.

Take DropBox and JungleDisk, for example. Amazon storage service, probably, is what made them possible (affordable), since maintaining their own storage infrastructure (with security, safety, scalability, etc.) is quite expensive and hard to get right.

On the other hand, many business will just not let go the control of having their own datacenter, some for good (strategic) reasons.

'The Cloud' is just another option. If it will turn into 'the only option', only time will tell :)