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I'm trying to figure out what are the key technological innovations or inventions that the "cloud" introduces as an improvement over web pages; or maybe over SAAS.

Seems to me that "cloud" is merely a new marketing word for technology that's been around for a while.

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cloud computing is nothing new, what is new the the availability of high speed internet allowing companies to market cloud concepts to people who don't need it at a low enough cost that they buy it anyway and companies make tons of money from it. similar to text messaging.

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Back around the turn of the century, there was a big todo about the concept of an ASP (Application Service Provider). The idea was that a third party would host your software for you and you pay monthly licensing fees.

Cloud computing is basically taking that concept to another level. Rather than buying the hardware or provisioning it from a traditional web host, a Cloud Provider can provide you the hardware to run your application on demand. If you see a sudden spike in usage, you can crank up the capacity and when it goes back to normal levels you can dial it down.

This allows you to avoid the upfront costs to prepare for high volumes enabling what is called utility computing. That is you pay for what you use. Of course, like many things in technology, this is nothing new. Large companies with mainframes used to rent out horsepower to other companies under a similar model called timesharing which is exactly what it sounds like.

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It depends on who you ask.

In cloud computing, your application is still being hosted on a virtual server with failovers in a massive data center. Technically there is nothing being done there that can't be done within an on-site datacenter, but the cost savings with the cloud are that you don't need to run a datacenter, buy and maintain hardware or hire people to support it.

Of course the massive datacenter requires money to run a datacenter, purchase and maintain hardware and hire support personnel, however a single small datacenter might require 8 employees to maintain, a massive one hosting cloud applications requires perhaps a few hundred but replaces a 1000 small datacenters. Net job deficit = smaller costs = smaller month to month operation fees for clients. Further these massive data centers bully themselves into regions (Eg. Texas) that will not charge them any taxes and sometimes even provide subsidies for the massive amounts of electricity they consume. This further lowers their bottom line.

EDIT: Removing unnecessary personal information, and prejudices.

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IIRC Amazon introduced the cloud concept. They build an infrastructure of scalable, commodity hardware for their peak shopping season. Then commercialized it. Since then every marketing department anywhere have re-branded themselves with a cloud.

To me the key point is the cloud is a set of cheap, unreliable resources. Your solution has to be built to keep running when the resources fail, and have a scalable architecture that can utilize additional resources as they are added.

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For the consumer version of the cloud -- that is some take on "My content lives in the sky and can rain down to any device by magic" -- the key driver was cheap, ubiquitous bandwidth, both wireline and wireless. None of the other technologies involved matter a lick if you can't get your data anywhere anytime.

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