Being able to just type in my name and password on some new laptop and having all my stuff immediately available to me has a pretty cloudy feel to me. I’m not sure whether you should call it “cloud”, though, that only seems to be unnecessarily confusing.
By the way, using my definition you would be perfectly justified in calling some pretty old technology “cloud computing”. A Gmail account you access with IMAP (vintage 1986) would be the prime example.
What might be new is that the users usually don’t have to care about the technical details. When you are using IMAP you have to enter server names and other yucky stuff, that’s not the case with Dropbox.
Cloud computing is not all that different from old mainframe setups. It's just a lot more interactive (and with 40 years of technological advancement). So the still-relevant artifacts of that era are at home in the 'cloud'.
Another comparison: Netbooks marked a definite return to the thin client. Only now it's wireless.
By the way, using my definition you would be perfectly justified in calling some pretty old technology “cloud computing”. A Gmail account you access with IMAP (vintage 1986) would be the prime example.
What might be new is that the users usually don’t have to care about the technical details. When you are using IMAP you have to enter server names and other yucky stuff, that’s not the case with Dropbox.