What is cloud computing? Ten points?

Please explain with an example. Ten pointsWhat is cloud computing? Ten points?
Cloud computing is a simple way to describe network storage routines. The internet is a transport for data ( posts, answers, web pages, financial data, information, advertisements, etc ).



Sheer Opinion: For some time, people ( generally not computer savvy; yet financially.. ) were confused about describing the relationship between data and the internet, and how to capitalize on it in some way. This is were the term cloud became the buzz word for this relationship. They needed a buzz word so they could sell it to other not so puter savvy people.



Data is stored on a computer-%26gt; which runs a web server/s-%26gt;which runs a data storage software ( SQL database, XML database, Flat file database, or some kind of datastore )-%26gt; on the computers filesystem-%26gt;which is on the computer's hard disk.



The idea is that in most cases hosting the web does not require 80 gigs of hard disk space, maybe 1gig for an average/medium site with 10k users whose data is stored on the machine.



The idea is to get users to buy space, save electricity, save hardware costs, save on maintenance, get improved performance - the computers being used are usually 10x more powerful than one you might get at best buy; yet that power is shared amoung other users who may want to buy space. When you have more then 10 servers, you will start to see the huge benefit. Since its not really important where the data is stored or lives, one may abstract the idea of the data living in the " cloud ". It could have been in the " volcano/ desert/ "; yet ideas in computing are abstracted to layers so what could be a higher layer than a cloud, plus it sounds cool.



A perfect example is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), the first google hit that came up was " Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing ... "



While these ideas are loosly based, it should give you enough information to get the gist of why one might need it and why the term was coined, since it was re-termed to be a solution to problem.



Convincing sales video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_DKNwK_鈥?/a> ]What is cloud computing? Ten points?
a program for weathermen maybe?