When Larry Ellison says he has no idea what the cloud is, he is faking it, he is shaking in his boots in terms of the IT industry as it is today (including the decision makers).

Cloud computing takes power from hosting, it management, it infrastructure and gives this gift to programmers/engineers and architects. This is a really good time to be a programmer and aware of the power of this paradigm change.

I disagree, or agree only superficially. IT departments start off as innocuous places where the guy who knows how to fix the copier hides, but as things grow they're responsible for maintaining the security and availability of the company's information assets. So long as the data is not of strategic value it won't rouse the attention of the executive level management, but as awareness of the value of the data grows (read: data loss, security issue, or regulatory violation) you can bet CIOs will create policies prohibiting use of external systems, and crack down on violators.

So, I think cloud computing will afford a small window of flexibility for companies, but will ultimately get rolled in to the larger IT picture. If so, however, it will probably increase flexibility in IT department policies, which is good news for everyone -- IT executives look good if they're flexible, leaf nodes don't get any joy from telling people no, and the IT department customers get more of what they need with less red tape.