dAzED1, You're quite right in your facts. This is not something that your average techno-geek (or slashdot nerd) is going to grok or espouse, as you're seeing here. It something that will save enterprises (the larger the better) huge piles of money, while providing all the benefits you cite (and a few you have missed).

I'm riding this wave, too, but from the other side of the table. And Cloud - as an enabler - is bringing fantastic (in a business sense) and fascinating (in a technical sense) technologies to the realm of possibility.

The reason I'm replying, though, is to cast a bit of a cautionary note: not everything is cloud-ready or even cloud-friendly. Regulatory issues like BASEL II will make some information/applications impossible for public cloud. SPI (sensitive personal information) and 'classified' or 'confidential' information may never be put into a public cloud. And that's as it should be.

However, having said that, there are private cloud solutions and hybrid solutions that can be brought to bear.

"Cloud" is the foundation technology, the infrastructure enabler, as I see it, that will allow and even encourage this 'entirely new paradigm' to grow and flourish into an entirely new generation of technologies.

And the rate of adoption is just terrific; the interest is, as someone described it to me recently, so exciting it's scary. It will be some time before the field settles, but my money's on the global players who can bring virtually limitless resources to the problem.