mikedee - 2:44 am on Dec 18, 2007 (gmt 0)

If the iPhone is anything to go by then the cloud is alive and well, it incorporates cloud services from Yahoo, Google, YouTube and others without a broadband connection. This is enough for consumers, they have been trusting their email to the cloud forever.

Office documents are so 1990's, they were originally designed to transition from the paper to the digital age. I think that cloud services will excel with managing communications and links between people and documents rather than authoring documents. It will also take place on lots of devices, not just PCs.

Everyone is Microsofts competitor, but thats only because they put themselves in that position. You do not see Google vs. Apple or Apple vs. Yahoo - battle to the death. Microsofts business plan is to extinguish competition. I think that Googles plan actually involves some sort of vision.

Corporations with many users can buy the cloud and install it on their intranet, Google does this with the search appliance already. Whats exchange and sharepoint server if not a private cloud service? Many companies are now also trusting their email services to GMail (not Exchange).