Story

seems incredibly attractive in principle, i.e., outsourcing data backups and ubiquitous access to services are value-added features.

The risks are to data privacy and service lock-in, I suppose. It will be interesting to see which businesses and practices migrate towards or away from cloud computing going forward.

I wonder whether IBM will compete with offerings from Google, Amazon, and Apple, or attempt to differentiate its offerings for niche business categories. Any thoughts on niche business categories where cloud-computing services are not and, perhaps, will not be addressed by the big consumer-facing companies?