...or Google Appengine

Google's Appengine is a different type of cloud - a lot higher level, so you don't have to worry about the OS - which is good if you believe Google's sysadmins are better than you, and bad if you want to do low-level tinkering (using any port but http, for instance).

Standardising this would be a very different exercise, requiring standardised APIs rather than standardised machine image management.

We need a finer definition of cloud services - maybe "Cumulus cloud" for low level Amazon-style clouds, and "Cirrus clouds" for high level Appengine-style offerings.

"to make Java run properly on Ubuntu."

Ah - does this explain why an OpenOffice database runs i-n-c-r-e-d-i-b-l-y slowly on my 8.10 laptop (taking about 5 seconds to search 70 records!) but is as snappy as anything on my Linpus Lite Acer Aspire One?

Obligatory title

"He noted we're years away from reaching a final definition of cloud."

Yeah, the outlook remains foggy.

Kudos to Greg Fawcett for the first meteorological pun here.

When I saw "nebulous cloud computing market" my grey jelly obfuscater converted it to "cumulo-nimbus cloud computing market".

And I can't seem to resist a pedant point:

"the phrase "cloud" is being banded about"

Er, isn't it bandied about? Can anyone help me?

And of course the advantage of a Cloud

is you can have an inhouse cloud, do your backups to part of a 'freinds' cloud and vice versa and have all your internal machines as part of your cloud, all users do their work in the cloud and 95% of your system admin goes out the window and no other parasite owns your data.

Pedantry upon pedantry

- "the phrase "cloud" is being banded about"

- Er, isn't it bandied about?

Yes it is, and it's also not a phrase, it's a word.