Economist: Unlocking the Cloud

The Economist is now reporting on the cloud. They’ve picked up on the very real concern of vendor lock-in because of proprietary standards. The article focuses on data portability between SaaS apps, but the same issue arises in IaaS (different proprietary virtualization formats, despite what the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) promises), and in PaaS (google app engine extensions to Python which are hard to ignore and lock you into their platform).