I'm with Amazon's CTO, Werner Vogels, that traditional IT vendors are trying to detract companies from moving to providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google with the notion of "private clouds".
The reason is simple. The long term trend is the tear down of lots of infrastructure and the suppliers of traditional data centers (everything under the roof - from racks to server hardware to IT services) stand to see their markets shrink.
That's because instead of 100 companies with 100 data centers, you're likely to see an exponential gain in efficiency and maybe only have 10 data centers (if that) hosted by the big cloud providers 10+ years down.
Microsoft appears to be making some headway but their approach where you are required to re-implement "software as a service" and use Microsoft object models means that they are likely to pickup customers much later vs. sooner. Amazon's EC2 with its ability to pretty much run whatever you want on a LINUX image means legacy systems can be pushed there sooner vs. later.
This also opens the door for Microsoft falling behind in market share. Then again, Apple's market capitalization just eclipsed MS' (moral of the story: Windows & Office are screwing MS' ability to innovate). While MS might have a compelling offering for completely new deployments of software systems, i.e. you architect your new software system embellishing the Azure.NET object model, this approach also locks you into Microsoft's system in a major way. Whereas if you're running 100 servers on Amazon's EC2 and you have some Ruby code on them, you can always move your software to Rackspace since your software isn't tied to deep abstractions (aka an object model). Said Ruby code would have worked just as well in a classic data center (not the case for the Microsoft path because Azure didn't exist in the past).
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