Nicolas Carr about Azure & Competing cloud platforms

Extract below from a blog post from Nicolas Carr (yep, the author of the famous book “Does IT matter?”) on Azure and competing platforms

We can (and will) have debates about the relative openness of Azure and AWS and Force.com and all the other "cloud platforms" that are available or will be available. And those will be important debates. But in this early stage of the cloud's development, openness means little to the buyer (or user). The buyers, particularly those in big companies, are nervous about the cloud even as they are becoming increasingly eager to reap the benefits the cloud can provide. What they care about right now is security, reliability, features, compatibility with their existing systems and applications, ease of adoption, stability of the vendor, and other practical concerns. In the long run, they may come to regret their lack of stress on openness, but in the here-and-now it's just not a major consideration. They want stuff that works and won't blow up in their faces.

Full article on Nicholas Carr’s blog post about this.