I am impressed to see a simple and fresh perspective on the cloud. Notwithstanding all the hype about the cloud, I see the minimum value that it has to provide is "hosting done right." If we face the facts, most if not all of the "hosting" advertised on the internet is oversold, resulting in hosting getting a bad rap, and certainly only of interest to small businesses or low-end consumers. Cloud computing has the opportunity to go beyond that bad rap, and embracing Bray's tenets is one way to do that. Vendor-independence certainly will lead vendors to clean up their acts!

There are other potential (and mostly unrealized) advantages of cloud computing as well which I think will give it a better name than hosting:
- Less cross-customer side-effects from sharing of resource pools, resulting in predictable performance
- Better uptime due to published uptime statistics which drive vendors to improve (by shaming them!)
- Development of reference architectures or deployment platforms that improve interoperability and portability, including the virtual private data center model that some cloud vendors use
- Improved vendor transparency so businesses will trust their crown jewels to the cloud
- More focus on the customer due to a more competitive market

I'm not convinced PHP is the only way to go here. Once you bring a language into the discussion, you bring religion into the discussion! There are other languages that would easily quality as "cloud ready" including Google's choice of Python. And let's not forget Java, which our customers have been very successful with. What's more important is the quality, interoperability, and portability the service provides - in other words, the value. This is because ultimately value is measured in the people-time and organizational effort required to deploy to the cloud, not just the cost per CPU-hour.