Please forgive my ignorance, but I still don't understand how this could live up to everything the article says it could do. I am specifically referring to the part of the article that mentions MS Office.<p>I use Excel heavily when I am working with financial data from 10Ks and 10Qs. I've tried other services that are competitors of Excel, but only the Open Office version comes close to having the same functionality, and I usually don't even need the more advanced features of Excel. Will the cloud (correct term?) eventually be able to offer the full functionality of Excel?
It's computing with multiple data centers...<p>You can have a local cloud (a data center that you're in) and an external cloud (an undisclosed number of data centers that are external to you)... but whenever you abstract the number of external data centers, that becomes a cloud.
The term "Cloud computing" has been abused quite heavily but here's how I understand it:<p>Your use of an external service where your use of that service (e.g. storage, processing power etc.) is so small compared to the global use that you are able to scale up and down without affecting anyone and the system as a whole. You also only pay for the amounts of the service that you have used.