At this point, I think we've all been inundated with advertisements and promises about cloud services and the like (iCloud, Google Docs, DropBox, etc.); some of these have proven useful, while others have... not. All of these are missing the point; "cloud," in this context, is meaningless, just another marketing buzzword like social media or gamification.
"The cloud," more properly, could be represented as infrastructural automation. Whereas traditional servers, even when they were sitting in data centers, generally represented a "computer" in some sense, cloud servers are usually virtual computers that run within a software product that itself is running on a physical server. That is to say, a very powerful computer pretends to be multiple smaller computers. Thus, if you buy an "Amazon EC2 Instance," you're buying a virtual machine running on a server in Amazon's data centers.
This, coupled with Amazon's service infrastructure, means that you can create utilities that handle creating these virtual machines whenever you need them. Instead of having a sysadmin look at a PC and click around a user interface to set up a machine, you can set up automation so that you can type create-server -image websvc -git-rev a325afg and create a virtual machine that is already running the desired version of your software.
This is the power of cloud computing that matters. User-facing services aside, this is the attraction of THE CLOUD for software companies, and it's the reason that Microsoft has just named Satya Nadella, formerly of their cloud computing division, their new CEO.
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