>  I'll take a stab at this...

>  For standards, I think either a committee will sprout up to manage
>  protocols (better) or the leading supplier will become the defacto
>  standard (more likely). Boutique providers will distinguish themselves
>  from the pack with support, proximity, price and environmental
>  friendliness among others, which I'll mention later.

>  As cloud services approach commodity status, they will all have up-
>  time of five nines, about the same performance, network hops, etc, so
>  then price will be a distinguishing factor. Because consumers want a
>  standard pricing metric for commodity products we will likely see grid
>  economies evolving.

>  Right now pricing is varied and complicated.  Amazon's pricing
>  structure is based on server capacity, MediaTemple uses a GPU and
>  Mosso uses requests. As customers already find these pricing schemes
>  too unpredictable, we will start to see tools arrive to help us
>  calculate our application demands in Grid Units. These "Grid Units"
>  could be based on process scheduling priority, processor and network
>  utilization, disk space, memory, etc. "Your application consumes 14
>  Grid Units." Multiply 14 by the vendor price per Grid Unit and you
>  know what you'll be paying before you move to any particular cloud.
>  That's an oversimplification, but I think the vendors who provide this
>  kind of predictability will win out.

>  With thousands of customers using the same cloud, eventually demand
>  will outstrip supply and affluent consumers will pay more for quicker
>  apps.  I think here, we will see competing vendors catering to
>  different customers by offering different resource management
>  mechanisms.  Some customers will want to bid for scheduling priority,
>  others will want to pay a higher fixed rate for higher priority
>  processing.  There are lots of algorithms and I don't know which ones
>  customers or vendors will prefer.  It is fairly certain though that
>  vendors will not leave revenue on the table when some customers will
>  pay more than others.

>  Back to standards, I think suppliers using proprietary APIs will
>  present a barrier to service adoption. "Will I have to rewrite my code
>  to work with your storage solution?" If the answer is yes, forget it.
>  When electricity was deregulated, customers could switch their
>  providers to save money or buy greener power, but if they had to
>  rewire their homes or buy new devices -- no one would.  ISVs are going
>  to build cloudable products and they'll want to write them once and
>  let the customer choose and pay for the cloud services independently.