John, my take on cloud is as follows: It is essentially smoke and mirrors. I can't remember his name but one of the founding fathers of the open source movement has ridiculed it openly as another way of reinventing revenue opportunities for the big players like MS, Oracle, Amazon, Google, et al...
However, it is not going to go away, simply because these guys can hype the market over and over again, this is because they have fat wallets and then some... But, I believe it will become more transparent cost-wise as more and more organisations vie for your business.
You are of course right about dedicated server and VPS solutions effectively being the same thing as the cloud. Cloud providers would argue that up time and speed are their aces in the pack, whereas I would counter that I have never experienced any downtime on my dedicated server and speed issues are probably more to do with fluctuations in your broadband connection. Also, I have noticed that the costs for these alternative services have significantly reduced since the advent of the cloud.
My main problem with the cloud is metered usage, how do you the user monitor what is really going on? You hear horror stories about massive mobile phone bills being racked for no apparent reason, imagine the same scenario with metered cloud usage...
I lost on the horses today, not much but enough to annoy me, that's probably why I'm a bit crabby... Hey Ho
