The titans of Silicon Valley were talking about cloud computing in the late 1990s — way before anyone called it cloud computing.  I remember Larry Ellison telling Charlie Rose that one day, we'd be accessing our data from a box on our desks, but the data would be off somewhere in a central server, not in the box. 

Today, whole businesses are building in the cloud, offering companies of every size the ability to manage information strategically — affording a focus on the various communities consuming the information, not where the information is stored.

ReadWriteWeb's excellent ReadWriteCloud, the online publication, just ran this article.  While it addresses cloud recovery and whether it's a new name for the simple backup, the article serves as a solid immersion into the value of cloud computing.