Is "cloud" the future? I am not qualified to decide that. My opinion however is based on history.

Lots of things have come to pass that I never thought would work. All of us are flawed in not being able to predict the future. Otherwise we would all be rich, as it would be simple to pick the right stocks.

On the other hand, business is selling the cloud. Previous sales pitches similar to this that failed include outsourcing (most companies now report that outsourcing costs more money than it saves), ASP software (Application Software Provider was the precursor to cloud, and failed miserably), Motorola's Irridium satellite phone, PDAs replacing PCs, cell phone replacing PCs, tablet PCs replacing PCs, network PCs replacing PCs. Now we have tablets (not the same thing as a tablet PC mind you) that actually are being accepted pretty well due to consumers thinking they are cool, but they aren't going to replace PCs either. Google is selling SAS in an attempt to take over for Microsoft. Apple is selling their version of the future, someone else will try next week.

There have been a lot of things that have worked well and sold enough units to be successful. Service companies are obviously doing well in this country since we really don't produce much of anything anymore. Still...

I for one am not a fan of the cloud. I think it is another marketing tool, like Web 2 and a million other things that some salesman decided he could make money on. There are too many risks for me to embrace it. What happens when my pipe to the Internet goes down? I can't control AT&T, but I can go into the data center and reboot a server. What happens when Cloud, LLC goes out of business? Where is my data now? The provider is gone, what recourse do I have? What happens when (not if, WHEN) they are hacked and my data is lost, and I get sued for losing credit card data, PII or PHI? I can control how I configure my network security, I can't control another company.

Will CEOs and CFOs embrace cloud? Yeah, a lot of them don't have the intelligence to understand the implications, and aren't savvy enough to ask the people they pay to know the risks. Will it eventually prove successful? Maybe. Will all of us be standing in line to sue when cloud companies cause us to have to deal with identity theft? Think about that before signing off on some initiative your boss is pressuring you into. Start thinking about how it will feel when you are the one affected by the lack of security at some other company.

Pessimistic view, yeah, I know. Reality tends to do that to you as you age and experience life.