>>>Obviously it is something Microsoft is promoting heavily. I receive MSDN Magazine in the mail, as I'm sure you do, too, and it has been running endless articles about cloud computing lately.
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>These big vendors may not be telling their minions yet, but they know perfectly well that the next Microsoft will be one of the cloud providers. Which shows how corrupt IT has become. Imagine if hip replacement manufacturers sought to take over all the hospitals and started awarding surgical degrees to promote/compel sales of their products. There would be an outcry and surgeons would band together to punish the vendor who tried to coerce the market and dis-empower the professionals. Boy, we developers are wimps and look what we've allowed.

I could find one of the threads where I was shocked when I realized the same thing, about the time if -VFP's change of status to EOL. The general message I got from most of the people was to just let the pants fall and bend over, nothing can nor should be done, we shouldn't interfere with a business's desire to make a quick buck over our backs, and if we're screwed in the process, just grow up and get over it. And other messages of the kind. I assume if M$ decided to erase all the open source code they find on our machines, the hubbub would die in two days, and there'd be a majority to claim that M$ is within their rights to do so, that we should stop whining and get over it, grow up and move on.

But then, it's not just the developers, it's the whole Western civilization that has become such. Just see the ISP's capping your bandwidth, Monsanto creating a food monopoly, codex alimentarius being inserted through the back door (is there still a way to sell raw milk and not go to jail?), chemtrails introduced into the sky and everyone pretends they are a natural thing which happened since the 1940s (although they can look at their own old photos and see for themselves when did they start appearing) etc etc. Where's the uproar?

>In a real market, the profession would anoint its own experts and system manufacturers would compete for the business of cloud providers who would compete for customers who probably wouldn't care much about the tech at the other end as long as it works. Control of every level would be a dream.

And not a dry one.