I am all for debates. Some might even say I've become a master at it. But this whole private cloud versus public debate has to stop. We're fighting the symantics of the english language. Really who cares? If you want to run your own data center like Google or Amazon and call it a private cloud -- so what? If you want to outsource your infrastructure to Google or Amazon and call it a public cloud -- even better. If you want to focus on running your business rather than a data center, good on ya. But please, stop debating the semantics of a metaphor already. It's like a computing black hole where nothing smart or interesting can ever escape. But that's an analogy, which makes me an idiom ;-)