Down times of Amazon and Google's cloud computing platforms have been an issue lately, but I believe the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages. The best thing cloud computing offers is "power to the people", it lowers the entry barrier for start-ups leaving the innovators to do what they do best... innovate, instead of worrying about infrastructure issues. Imagine how better off Twitter would have been if they didn't have to worry about down time and instead invested their energies in bettering the twitter user experience. I've covered the benefits of cloud computing to application developers in my blog http://sachendra.wordpress.com/2008... - Sachendra from FriendFeed MT Plugin