""In the future, there are going to be hundreds of different clouds," explains Freese. "Customers do no want to be locked into to any one cloud, and they will want to be able to move around clouds.""

Uh ... Herr Freese, folks already do that, using software commonly known as "browsers". It's called "The Web", which is a minor sub-set of a thingie known as "The Internet". It's been around for a couple decades now, do try to keep up.

Shades of the QIPS exchange from Greg Egan's "Permutation City" here methinks.

Are there any new ideas these days where the underlying idea is actually, er, new?