Two recent articles (NYT and BusinessWeek) got me thinking about these clouds. Amazon, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google are all building services that can be remotely accessed and executed on their own computers. Users can access services from anywhere through these clouds. In effect, we will be going back to the days of mainframes but this time with many more user friendly and useful applications. Many generic applications can be delivered on-demand using these clouds and users can pay for them like they would for an utility like electricity. These modern day utility companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are creating data centers and building processing  centers to host applications. In fact, the BW article estimates that Google is spending $2 billion a year in data centers alone. To that we need to add costs for developing systems software like MapReduce or Hadoop (read the BW article). Once these modern day utility companies build out the expensive infrastructure and clouds, their scale will help them become the dominant provider of these services. Consumers benefit from the next wave of innovation that will be launched using services provided on these clouds.