If you think that cloud is just an over-used word you need to see this keynote from Build 2012. If you don't watch such videos make this an exception. It might change the way you think about things.

Scott Hanselman was let loose, there is no other way to describe it, at this years Build 2012 and he explained the way that the cloud really does change everything. The video is funny, thought-provoking and one of the best "deep thoughts" on the effects of the cloud you can see.

For a sample try the introductory text:

"One day we woke up and things were different. Maybe it happened overnight, maybe it took many years. Suddenly the ASP.NET Web Stack is open source, hosted using Git on CodePlex and taking pull requests from the Mono team. We can run node.js and Java alongside ASP.NET in the Azure Cloud and deploy them easily. The Visual Studio editor supports HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in a big way. ASP.NET ships not only the open source jQuery library out of the box but also KnockoutJS, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile and Modernizr. The Azure SDKs are hosted on Github. We are scripting thousands of Virtual Machines from the command line while others are creating things today with JavaScript that were impossible yesterday. Join Scott Hanselman as he explores the relationship between the Cloud and the Browser, many Languages and one Languages, how it might all fit together and what comes next. Development is fun again."

"One day we woke up" - some think that it's to a nightmare. Scott does his best to convince the viewer that it is the best of all possible worlds we woke up to and that the dead carcasses of forgotten technologies smoldering in the background are the price we pay for such progress.

Let me not spoil the fun, however, just watch the video and see a Microsofty's view of the way things are.

Could the video's title - <AngleBrackets/> && {Curly Braces} - catch on as a way of describing HTML/JavaScript development. It's cute but too long!