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Most companies who gross over $500 million per year are Microsoft Shops. Open Source is for the other 95% of small businesses (rule of thumb, not always). Microsoft has the advantage of history (both good and bad) and longevity. I run Microsoft WSS 3.0 (the free version) inside of an Ubuntu Virtual Machine in my lab. I share my WSS 3.0 deck on slideshare at http://wss.gregrank.us/ Like it or not Microsoft, Amazon and Google are buying property on all the big rivers and dams and plugging directly into the power grid at the source. This is their business model: cloud and collaboration services for a hand held and ipad future world order. Another good resource for evaluating the move to the cloud: http://www.cloudsecurityalliance.org/guidance/csaguide.v2.1.pdf

There are two different objectives here [...]

I can think of a third objective.

Imagine Microsoft and RSA, the security division of EMC seeing the Cloud as the latest cache of IT gold, and imagine those players identifying security (particularly security compliance) as the only real barrier to that gold. Now its easy to see the third objective - those players doing their utmost to remove that barrier.