Response to HBR's "Will Cloud Computing Ever Be Up To the Challenge?"

To answer the question in your title - it already is, as millions of business users can attest. I find it a bit puzzling that, for the most part, the fact that the Danger platform is a legacy ASP client/server architecture (http://www.danger.com/platform/detail.php) is lost in a vast majority of articles on the subject. If the experts do not call out the differences, how in the heck are average companies supposed to do so - just because an application is hosted and served over the internet does not make it cloud computing.

Danger/MSFT took technology designed for on-premise enterprise applications, likely applied virtualization technology in order to scale efficiently and provided an ASP client/server platform for T-Mobile. 

Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Workday and others by contrast have created architectures from the ground up specifically purposed to provide cloud computing solutions - multitenant, elastic scalability, metered use, service based, and internet centric. The utilization of grid computing provides vastly improved redundancy and DR capabilities over client/server counterparts. 

Yes, cloud vendors will fail (providing excellent opportunities to buy their stocks!) but their reliability (and functionality) easily trump on-premise applications. The responsibility of the CIO (and each Officer) is to the Mission Statement of the firm - you can not argue having specialized resources to support something as commodity as email is the best use of the firm's capital. All software and hardware is commodity until they are applied to a system - it is how the SERVICES are applied to the business that creates value - this is why the economics of Cloud Computing are an unstoppable force. Google and other cloud vendors don't specialize in software and hardware - they specialize in systems. They have created specialized utility systems rather than just utilizing a new delivery medium (the internet) and improved scaling ability (virtualization) for legacy technologies - the advantages of the purpose-built system over the hybrid are infinite. 

Your points are important and valid but it is also important to distinguish between technologies when possible. The Danger/MSFT failure was a client/server, not cloud, paradigm failure and if anything shows the importance of firms to utilize true cloud computing vendors when possible. It is also important to distinguish between technologies in order to keep vendors honest and consumers informed.