I've decided to withdraw from further participation in discussions on Twitter or forums where conversations endlessly orbit around the definition cloud computing, its characteristics and impacts. In lieu of this, here's what I think.

(A working draft)

Defining cloud computing is really a drinking game thought up by traditional software vendors and consultants.
The emergence of the small businesses cloud and the original wave of PC computerization 30 years ago share the same change dynamic. [RELATED]
Cloud computing = disintermediation = FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) posing as debate from the soon-to-be-disintermediated.
The soon-to-be-disintermediated include people like technology consultants. Consultants have always over-complicated things.
For some, getting this new world is as hard as programming VCRs was for our parents thirty-years ago.
Your ability to execute a 'cloud strategy' is inversely proportionate to the size of your organization. Small businesses don't employ CIOs. You do the math.
Cloud tech empowered small businesses will increasingly threaten their larger, slower counterparts. [RELATED]
Anyone can throw together a nice looking app front-end and a marketing website for a little more than the cost of a broken roller skate and half a pack of chewing gum. And anyone can forget to take care of your data.
Our 20th century, industrial era storefront mentalities don't work when evaluating cloud apps.
Just like we learned to instinctively tell when an email from Nigeria promising riches was too good to be true, we need learn the same for filtering apps. [RELATED]
A traditional software company's view of the cloud today shares much in common with minicomputer manufacturers and electric typewriter companies who thought that the emergence of the PC was not a threat to their existence and they could easily compete. [RELATED]
Once simple, PC business applications have ballooned down a single axis of expansion into lumbering monoliths that only serve to retard progress by preserving an embodiment of a 1980's industrial context. [RELATED]
The cloud provides a economic environment for simple, single task apps to be viably distributed again. [RELATED]
A "hybrid cloud strategy" is a way for traditional software companies to drop the words "cloud" and "online" into brochures, press release boilerplates and to pretty up market announcements.
You can't get a little bit pregnant.
Read cloud customer satisfaction reports carefully; how much do they love YOUR service, versus how much are they in love with the fact it's not the Windows 95 clunker they used before. Many cloud apps are "so much better than [insert Windows App]" because they share the same, universal cloud traits. Don't mistake customer delight with this generic cloud transformation with specific delight with your company or product. You're probably not _that_ good.

Contributions welcome, but only if they're really, really good and I agree with them. So, not really.