To me, the cloud commercials highlight the issues of sharing and not being overly dependent on a piece of hardware that can fail. It's a good thing for consumers, many of whom struggle to get things done online. Heck, I know sharing files with people can be a hassle if you can't email them.

In terms of IT, the point I was making is that private clouds make a lot of sense. Deploying to a SQL Server in the cloud, using a database name instead of worrying about ServerA or ServerB, makes a lot of sense to me.

As far as decision makers, they can say what they want. Ultimately they'll get sold something by someone. Public cloud, private, depends on who woos them the best.