Instead, I've been thinking about what it offers lowly end-users, or for programmers who create the software. What does cloud computing mean for the rest of us?

As far as computer-illiterate end-users are concerned, cloud computing offers many benefits. For example, have you ever lost a file or an update to a document, because you didn't save it before a crash happened?

With an online , it's impossible to lose work. Files are automatically saved every few seconds. There's even revisioning, meaning that you can step back to a file when it was in a previous state. Google Docs isn't alone in offering this. Cloud file storage service lets you revert to a previous version of your files, too.

The best part is that cloud services don't even require users to understand what "saving" is. There's no longer a need to understand file systems, ushering in a level of simplicity computer engineers have been searching for since the personal computer was invented.

Cloud computing offers more permanence for your files than desktop computing. Give yourself a few minutes to think about that. . Hard disks crash. But no file will ever disappear from the cloud unless you choose to delete it.