Is cloud computing about productivity or something else?

From time to time, I read about a study that appears to be using a measurement that doesn't make sense.  When I see such a study, I have to wonder if the sponsors understood the basic concept.

I just came across just such a study. Gary Kim recently published Cloud Computing Won't Boost Productivity Much, Study Suggests which mentions a study published by the U.K. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The conclusion of the study is that cloud computing is not going to contribute substantially to the productivity of small to medium size enterprises in the U.K.

While this is an interesting notion, Cloud Computing is a delivery consumption model allowing organizations to access computing resources larger than they may have been able to purchase, more complex than their IT team could manage and also to be able to deploy, tear down and then redeploy these resources very rapidly without having to acquire real estate, build buildings, obtain power and communication, etc. It is also about having access to enterprise-class applications and tools that might be more expensive than an organization would be able to acquire on its own.

Cloud computing is far more about agility, cost control and being able to do things previously impossible than about being able to do more of the same old thing.