Last night Amazon finally did what a number of companies have been striving to do, releasing a consumer-friendly way to take advantage of cloud computing. Not that plenty of consumers weren't already enjoying some benefits of the Cloud for home productivity in tools like Google Docs and Gmail's gigs of storage. But Amazon's Cloud Player, which utilizes their Cloud Drive to allow free-roaming access to your music via internet or Android, takes things to a new stage, with entry-level pricing leverage that the smaller music vault pioneers will be hard pressed to match. And not only does Amazon's taking advantage of its mass market reach and cloud infrastructure tower over those smaller outfits, it now casts a shadow toward the iTunes monopoly. Why buy and download music from Apple when you can get it from Amazon with the incremental storage for free, and be able to access it nearly anywhere at any time? In an age where more businesses are realizing the power and convenience of cloud computing, it's time for cloud computing's big breakthrough into the consumer lifestyle markets, and this looks like it. Finance forecast: clearly Cloudy with continued consolidation.

Speaking of which, we also note Ciscos latest acquisition, cloud computing company, newScale, this morning back in enterprise IT land.