This is one of those questions with which I am getting bored.  You can’t attend a conference these days without someone asking that question.  The constant theorizing is akin to the classic debate of “Kirk or Picard?”  It’s a question that may never get answered, and in fact will engage the nerds for decades to come.

After my conversations last night at the Structure VIP reception, I came to the conclusion that the word “cloud” is like catnip for nerds.  You can attach the word cloud to anything to attain relevancy.

During his panel at the Structure 09 conference (being live streamed from GigaOm), James Lindenbaum from Heroku said that he doesn’t want to think about the question anymore; in fact, he wants to avoid the word “cloud” all together.  Instead, he would prefer that people focus on building applications and rely on abstractions provided by the development frameworks than to think about to cloud or not to cloud.

This just in, local San Francisco entrepreneurs are launching the world’s first cloud gas station.  They supply a true multi-tenant, pay by the drink model, removing the need to purchase your own refineries, and abstracting the gas production process to deliver a truly seamless experience for downstream customers.

Next up on the zeitgeist watch?  Attaching the word “scale” to the name of your company.