In a story that remains free notwithstanding the magazine's recent movement of more content behind a pay wall, the brand new Economist takes an overview of cloud computing. It gets right to the point:

A storm brewing?
First is the familiar risk of technological lock-in, as rival companies promote their own, mutually incompatible, standards and formats, as they have done in the past.

CLOUD intends to solve that problem for information about you. What better way to avoid technological lock-in for Internet users than to create a multi-industry standard computing language that puts people back in charge of their own information? Turns out this approach addresses the Economist's second and third concerns -- privacy and security -- too.