Surely  he knows gmail has a pop and IMAP option? So it can be SaaS or S+S - it's your choice.

I believe that the "trap" might be that as more and more of us use the cloud as part of our day to day working practices we become more dependend on  these"free" services, that may not always be free with the worsening "credit crunch", so unless we have back up plans we may find ourselves in difficult positions should the current models or services colpse over night. I can see governments bailing out backs but not start ups.

I do think that there is a lot of hype right now surrounding cloud. Many corporates have spent the last few years with server consolidation projects and a general shift to virtualisation.  Cloud presents another big shift for them, with potential savings on virtual licensing costs that they currently have to pay.

Microsoft, IBM, Dell and others are all working on their cloud offerings. However, we are looking at a good few years before the SaaS, or S+S  will become mainstream. It's too early right to judge right where big business will spend their cash.

A loss of 'control' regarding your data or infrastructure, is not a new thing. Just ask all of those companies who have outsourced their infrastructures to the likes of Infosys, or Wipro.  Agreed, cloud services are somewhat different, but corporates are not as frightened as they once used to be at 'letting go'.  You better believe, the SLA's and OLA's will be water tight on how that data is kept, backed up and stored!

Software + Services, as a platform, appears to differentiate Microsoft's cloud offerings quite well. The question is whether other vendors will innovate, or just rebrand their current web offerings and cover them with a little 'cloud spray' to compete?

also Steve, not sure if you heard the last Gillmor Gang but they were discussing a change in strategy for MS (at least on a branding level). The emphasis being that it was cloud + computing rather than Software + services

Maybe another term they could use is "belt and braces", or "belt and suspenders" as they say over in the States.

I think the do think value of SLAs becomes less ironclad in the new uncertain economy and risk management will become a greater part of procurement processes.

Companies of any size could take a bath.  It's probably more limited to start-ups and near start-ups that rely on external financing, but customers with big exposures will be checking ratios far more closely now, rather than just looking at the offering itself.

Admittedly, most decent assets (read customers) are usually picked up by the pecking vultures, but you can't guarantee you'll get picked up by a vulture you want to do business with.

Gareth

It depends on  what Data you expose to a third party.Certain data does need some sort of SLA and few you cant simply expose.However once you saw the failure of UDDI which enterprise saw  UDDI hosters as big sharks,these thoughts will be always there until ,there is an option to move out of cloud computing and ownership chains.I persoanlly saw cloud computing and grid computing still needed to grow and optimized for folks to adopting it.

Using Gmail was a poor example. Email is worthless if it is only in your own hands. And the minute you click that Send button, you've lost control of who gets to see it because you don't know what email servers (and where) it will pass through.

But control of data is an important consideration that is too easily dismissed when people compare cloud computing to electricity. The analogy may work for the processing power, but not for the data that the processing is for.

you been reading The Big Switch Sharon?

James - we're definitely talking more about cloud computing and will for sure at PDC but that is part of Software plus Services so the S+S term is definitely not going away

fair point about Gmail having POP/IMAP but I think he was using that as a canonical example of cloud computing/SaaS