Is cloud computing where E-Mail was in the 1980's?

There is an interesting article about Vinton Cerf's Keynote at Interop about the state of cloud computing and comparing it to E-Mail in the late 1980's.  For those of you not familiar with how E-Mail was then think isolation.  No way to get E-Mail from one service provider to another.  Then MCI managed to get permission and by the end of the 1980's everyone was sending E-mail to everyone else.  Mr. Cerf makes a lot of good points about how things were then and how simillar the state of cloud computing is today.  Check out the article and if you can find the Keynote online let us know so we can link to it.