Distribution means not a single point of failure. So both cloud computing and maybe Opera Unite are advances on that.
But saying cloud computing is not the direction I believe it wrong. The idea of cloud computing is really adding more distribution to your network. So you can have cheaper servers all over rather than just your servers at one data center with a remote data store that never has been checked.
Opera Unite is really just the IRC and a slice of P2P. But there will be huge reliability problems as with any distributed P2P system.
But saying cloud computing is not the direction I believe it wrong. The idea of cloud computing is really adding more distribution to your network. So you can have cheaper servers all over rather than just your servers at one data center with a remote data store that never has been checked.
Opera Unite is really just the IRC and a slice of P2P. But there will be huge reliability problems as with any distributed P2P system.