...and won't be the last the abuse the whole "stick the flavour of the day buzzword on our products"- I remember when Java was this way and then XML (I'm looking at you, Bentley Microstation)

IBM has had "cloud" in their mind as long as I remember back to 70's, especially after Series 1 and 8100 (the canceled 8000 series) came out. Series 1 was seriously fun systems! Of course the TP monitors were able for distributed processing and it was very easy to write RJE jobs, JES3 managing several computers, actually using non-IBM technology 100s of miles apart even in non-IBM systems. Systems programmers dream land!

Now, they have killed it as many times they have started (same as VM?) The problem with huge and slow moving corporation.

I don't know if they are serious this time? But at least they are aiming to large / very large corporations - the interfaces are not what a small company would use, times have changed! Lotus is really for large corporations - nice system but UI, etc not up to date. And binding it to Windows and even Java - what do they think?

And really, feature wise - what do you get more than in other systems? Or even without - I have documents perfectly safe in global services (encrypted!), manage / share X number of projects, one address book, can start video, whiteboard, telephone, whatever conferences at any time with my peers, share or not share files, etc, use any chat or IM or whatever at the same time, and so on - all this independent if in OS X, Linux or Windows (without SharePoint - heh!)? So - what would this give me more than I already have?

Cloud computing -- this will be differ from a time sharing bureau how exactly?