>Think "plausible deniability" - a big cog in a political machine, something Microsoft is surely a part of nowadays.

This is way to much paranio for me. So MS is lying to us about the meaning of what they say "cloud" is? What would the gain by that? In any case, this isn't an MS only term:

Michael Dunn of CTO Time Warner quote:
So when you're thinking about something that's within the purview of your day-to-day job--whether it's simple e-mail, a LAN/MAN/WAN environment, or your server environment--you also have to be thinking you're going to be out in the "public cloud"--that is, on the Internet--at some point as well.
http://www.sun.com/dot-com/sunjournal/v4n2/feature1b.html

Web services are HTTP at there most basic level. Ideally, XML is used as the way to pass info back and forth, but I don't think its a requirement to call something a "Web Service". VFP and Delphi both can do Web Services.