I came across Jeff Kaplan’s recent post, Welcome to Cloud 2.0, and realized that the moniker has moved beyond just Marc Benioff and salesforce.com trying to own a new term and will probably start to stick over the summer as more cloud pundits and vendors begin to use it freely.  My own thoughts:

• Was there ever a Cloud 1.0 to begin with?  I don’t even think we’ve been able to agree on a taxonomy or definition for the cloud, but I do agree with Jeff’s assertion that the initial driver of cloud services was price and cost savings.  Thankfully we’ve all become more creative in setting forth our value propositions.
• Does anything ever move beyond version 2.0 in the evolution of overarching technology terms and principles?  As much as we joke about being somewhere around “Web 8.64″ in the versioning of the concept and term, “Web 2.0″ is still the nom de guerre for the once-new way of looking at web content and media…and it’s sounding extremely dated.  Are we going to be stuck in “Cloud 2.0″ until the next seismic shift in technology, or can we work on a roadmap to get us to “Cloud 2.5″ or “Cloud 3.0?”
• Will “Cloud 1.0″ be considered a sort of purgatory for firms that haven’t made the shift even to the commodity cloud services that Jeff references?  Do you have to go through “Cloud 1.0″ to get to “Cloud 2.0,” or will there be a sort of “catch-up effect” that allows slower adopters to leapfrog the 1.0 paradigm?

Thoughts?