Additionally, all documents are located in one location, so managers can see at a glance what's going on. John from Accounts might have told you he spent all last night working on the spreadsheet, but now you can see whether that's true and what changes he's made, because the cloud is excellent at tracking revisions and edits.

This and other thought exercises indicate the biggest problem facing the cloud is a lack of usage scenarios. At the moment software companies are throwing their cloud products at us and concentrating on making them better, rather than telling us how they can be used. For cloud apps there's often no tried and trusted path as there is with, say, Microsoft Office, which everybody knows offers clearly identified business benefits.

It's down to education. Cloud vendors should spend less time telling us about all the great new features, and spend more time showing their products in real-life situations. Only then are we going to get into the cloud computing mindset.

Keir Thomas has been writing about computing since the last century, and more recently has written several best-selling books. You can learn more about him at and his Twitter feed is .