This is the third post in my “clouds over” series, which points out areas of the current IT landscape that will be affected by the inexorable move to cloud computing (the first post was on hosting, the second on DB software).  Today’s edition covers simple paid apps and services, such as hosted blogging platforms. Exhibit A is of course 37Signals’ Campfire, for which google engineers built a free version with very similar functionality which they had called HuddleChat.  Google took it down because some folks complained about it being a “knock-off” of Campfire.  Leaving aside that group chat application functionality and layout are not exactly super proprietary, the bigger point here is that it will ultimately be difficult to charge for many simple applications and services.  A major reason for paying will disappear with the move to cloud computing – that it currently takes some doing to operate even a simple service on a reliable and performant basis.  What HuddleChat showed is that with cloud computing that reason will disappear.  All services that are essentially single user services will be susceptible to this threat and that includes a lot!  With cloud computing having a data asset will be one of the few things that might make people pay for a service.