@kpbpsw Wow. What an ignorant post. No wonder there's not a single substantiating fact backing it.
- Windows Azure (their PaaS offering) supports full Java & PHP as well as .NET & ASP.NET
- Their cloud database offerings include both ultra-scalable data storage as well as relational SQL storage
- Microsoft Online Services (their SaaS offering) provides hybrid on-prem/hosted services for at least Exchange, Sharepoint, and Communications (might be more)
- Fully managed Virtual Machine hosting-as-a-service was announced at the beginning of the year for the IT control freak
- Azure Appliances provides a upgrade/update/patch-managable version of Windows Azure in corporation's backyards
As strong as their services are, I'm trying to figure out how AmazonWS is going to match Microsoft's breadth of managed offerings. They've got robust storage & VM support and good scale automation but no real PaaS or SaaS. I think they're the only real contender to Microsoft at this point with the power & experience to back it.
Meanwhile, it's clear that Google's ass-backward offering isn't going anywhere other than to web startups with no capital, supporting only Python & an oddly rudimentary subset of Java . (Seriously - Who are they targetting anyway?)
If anything. Salesforce's Force.com is the TRUE 'lock in' vendor with their proprietary language & tools, online services-only solution with virtually no data-extraction tools in the event you want to return to managing the solution in your own datacenter. "Force.com: We want you for life" should be a bumper sticker on Marc Benioff's Ferrari.
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