The term "cloud computing" has inspired a lot of thought, energy, ideas and enthusiasm. It's also sparked a lot of head-scratching, brow-furrowing and definition-debating. You might think that after several years of the concept being in the forefront of thought around business computing, this might have resolved itself and there would be a single, holistic view of what "the cloud" means. If you thought that, you'd be wrong.

Here's a view of "cloud computing": It's computing. You need an underlying infrastructure, the software to run on it, and a transport layer to make it all work together.

At a very, very basic level, it's the same as what we've done since the first time two computers were networked. Back then, though, we didn't hear scientists at IBM arguing about whether the hardware or the software WAS the computer, or which was really the network.

Nowadays, users are more sophisticated than back then, and yet we still figure out ways to baffle them around computing concepts.

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