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Few advertising campaigns are as misleading as Microsoft's TV campaign "To the cloud" in which those three words are intoned as an incantation that can cure a variety of ills.  The problem is that viewing a TV program on a computer via streaming video really isn't cloud computing. You may recall that was the cute solution to some travelers missing a show called "Celebrity Rehab."

Cloud computing generally implies a program operated over the web via a  browser, instead of accessing an application on a desktop computer. But Microsoft is probably doing more to interest users in cloud computing than anyone else, so from a practical matter, the company is doing everyone a favor.

The tax and accounting business, however, has remained remarkably resistant to the cloud, at least the professional tax and accounting business. At this week's Microsoft Convergence user conference in Atlanta, Kirill Tatarinov, the VP who heads the company's Dynamics software operations, said that about 50 percent the company's CRM customers opt for cloud operation; the other half go for on-premise software.

When it comes to mid-market accounting software, he said, "Not many [companies] are interested in having mission critical information in the cloud."

I'm not sure how true that is, but there is certainly a significant part of the market that doesn't want to put the data used to run the business in remote locations. But large companies are routinely doing this so the fear probably is probable overblown.

On the tax preparation side, as long as preparers can access documents over the web, the question of whether they can actually process across the Internet is probably not as meaningful.

So for the foreseeable future, while accounting firms may increasingly adopt mobile apps and utilize the web in many ways, the core tax and accounting function is going to remain one of the last areas in which cloud computing becomes a routine way of doing things.

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