This new model, Schmidt at the time, "starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing -- they should be in a 'cloud' somewhere."

(Credit for pointing out Schmidt's remarks goes to a 2008 blog post by .)

Amazon's EC2 was announced on Aug. 24 in 2006, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at , or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

in Computerworld's Cloud Computing Topic Center.