Surely, cloud platforms are becoming commodities. There are good reasons to select Force.com for prebuilt business logic, AWS for pay-as-you-use storage, etc. Perhaps, over time, these PaaS and IaaS offerings will all end-up in the same place - adding Microsoft Windows Azure, Google App Engine, Rackspace OpenStack et al. Even though, today, they all have different characteristics.
We shouldn't get obssessed by IT infrastructure machanics but, instead, begin to focus on SaaS and cloud app innovation. The PaaS-IaaS is a given. The SaaS is not: and quite a challenge it is too.
As we increasingly experience the commoditisation of IT, a SaaS player will be increasingly harder to define. Not just ISVs but firms replacing or augmenting people services with platform services.
Then the argument becomes one of user adoption with a need to have the economic advantage of the low-touch sell. This shifts the argument away from cloud infrastructure mechanics to user experience design: which in turn drives user adoption and the ultimate shareholder value of a SaaS venture.
In Geoffrey Moore speak, PaaS and IasS are Context, but SaaS and Design are Core.
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