I've had my head in the clouds the past few days, mulling the nature of cloud computing. Some might ask: Why bother? It's just another marketing concept cooked up by vendors that has no real meaning. Call me credulous, but... I’ve had my head in the clouds the past few days, mulling the nature of cloud computing. Some might ask: Why bother? It’s just another marketing concept cooked up by vendors that has no real meaning.Call me credulous, but I beg to differ. The past decade has been an inexorable march toward Internet technology, and cloud computing is the natural next step in that trend. Here’s how Executive Editor Galen Gruman and I circumscribed cloud computing in this week’s big feature article: “any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that — in real time over the Internet — extends IT’s existing capabilities.” That includes on-demand computing and storage, software as a service, managed security, Web services in the cloud, and a bunch of stuff that hasn’t been dreamed up yet.I’m fully aware of the fierce resistance in large companies to relying on services outside the firewall. No wonder — such dependencies often increase availability or security risks. And when you’ve subscribed to a bunch of services, without integration, you’re back to old-fashioned siloed applications, rather than the fully interconnected whole promised by service-oriented architecture. Zero up-front investment in servers, maintenance, and licensing are alluring, but cloud computing has a long way to go before it snags a significant chunk of IT. Major traction has been and will continue to be in small business for quite a while. Along those lines, I’ve been waiting for one shoe to drop for a long time: Isn’t Microsoft in a terrific position to deliver an entire suite of desktop and enterprise (i.e., the Dynamics CRM, financial, and business intelligence products) software in one virtualized gulp? Particularly for small businesses? Imagine, flip on your … terminal … and up comes everything you need in order to do business, including Office apps, streamed from Microsoft servers. Perhaps even an on-demand version of Active Directory with identity management could provision users and control access. Yeah, I know Microsoft doesn’t want to cannibalize its desktop business, but won’t open source and free on-demand apps from the likes of Google push it in the direction of a complete, subscription-based cloud offering sooner or later? It’ll have to compete against an unlimited number of best-of-breed players, of course, across an infinitely large cloud. Aggregators will play an important role in the long run, but ultimately, this sounds like the familiar battle between walled garden and wild Internet, closed versus open. The future may be cloudy, but it’s clear the old battles of the past will be fought again. Technology Industry