The original premise of clouds was good. Allow companies to run their software on someone else's machines. The cloud guys wanted to make more money so they started cloning commercial software and then charging companies to use their home-grown stuff. Then the cloud guys began to sub-divide and monetize slivers of service and components of hosting. The danger obviously is that you pay more than if you had your own on premise hardware. Even more serious is the fact you are locked in to their home-grown software and management tools. I predict a re-examination of the whole cloud paradigm at some point relatively soon.