Anecdotes and thoughts on Cloud Computing over the week-end; I've been working out of my office in Northern Illinois for the past two weeks. It's always good to see how The Heartland is responding to the latest and greatest in technology.

• On the consumer cloud side, you see the same dedication to Facebook, the same iPhones and Droid phones, and ubiquitous high bandwidth by US standards.

• I've also heard questions about the coming Windows 7/Nokia phones. Why should there be four major platforms?

• From the business side, the same question crops up. It's bad enough to have to support the iPhone and Droid phones, without the bundled server environment that RIM provides. Is there really room for anyone else?

• What shall we name Windows/Nokia anyway? Wokia sounds nice, and is already in use for all I know, but would probably not be popular in Redmond or Finland.

• Nobody cares about RIM's trouble keeping up with smartphones or its flat-footedness when it comes to tablets. This sort of "inside baseball" stuff is great for people who write about technology, but is not interesting to normal people. They'll buy whatever they like, without favor or pity to any particular vendor (except Apple, of course).

• More people mispronounce Steve's last name here, making him sound like the biblical figure. But I've heard very well-known technology writers do this, too, so nothing to get upset about, I guess.

• The iPad's tethering problem seems to be a genuine pain in the neck. "Looks like the cloud isn't so easy after all," said a developer friend of mine.

• There is no particular love or hatred for Microsoft, and no particular fascination with the Office 365/BPOS fiasco. Those people who make a living as Exchange managers seem secure in the knowledge that the Microsoft skunkworks approach will always enable them to be employed. No non-techie ever wants to deal with Microsoft; in the best of worlds, BPOS will free up some IT people to pursue interesting, productive things rather than just be firemen.

• Oh, and I was heartbreaking that Cisco didn't contact me over the week-end to let me take over the Flip cam business.

• The Business Impact of Cloud Computing
• The Comprehension of Cloud Subjectivity
• The Long Tail of Cloud Computing?