I would like to keep this question open and span both technical and non-technical aspects/values/problems/doubts, gathering both direct users' and outsiders' thoughts.
You should Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It really helped me out in situations like this.
how is the book relevant to cloud computing?
wrong thread :)
I use AWS, Heroku, DigitalOcean every day because they fulfill a need, for cheaper than I could do myself. What's to "think" about it? What do you "think" about car washes?
Unfortunately that term has been used in so many ways that it's practically meaningless at this point. Did you have a particular definition of 'Cloud Computing' in mind?
Can you be a little more vague?
OP already did her/his best.
I think cloud computing is a great thing. Pretty soon computers will be totally small, and you won't ever need to worry about losing data. Plenty of ways to protect it. So long as there is competition between cloud companies, people would drop a provider in a hurry if they thought their data was being compromised.
the "cloud" is a term used by uniformed non technical people. They don't know what they are saying when they use it. However, the "cloud" is simply access to data over a network. Emulating local data storage, but really accessed over a network.
I very strongly disagree. "The cloud" is generally understood, in my circles (and we're quite informed, though not uniformed, and just a teensy bit technical) to be elastically provisioned compute resources that allow us to avoid carrying inventory and turn CAPEX into OPEX.