>>Azure and 'the Cloud' are my current Microsoft pain points. All of Microsoft's new servers and applications are designed to move users into 'the Cloud' so Microsoft can suck $$ from them monthly. Their certifications are now heavily 'cloud' centric as well.
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>Microsoft's goals for Azure and .NET go beyond recurring fees, and into the realm of mass corporate data monitoring, mining, and allowing other entities to put up a business intelligence layer atop all your data on the cloud.
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>You still get all the security, reliability, scalability you're paying for. But that's only what you see. What you don't see, what happens inside the obscured "cloud" is the data mining, the ability to monitor transactions, find patterns on anything.
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>It's a scary prospect, and one going all but ignored by IT professionals. They just leap at the idea of pushing all executable code and data to Microsoft's remote server farms. [shudder]
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>>I'm assuming Microsoft has devoted too many resources in this blitz to back off any time soon, so that is why my company is really, really looking for alternatives (not finding them though).
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>Visual FreePro was created to be that alternative. Invest in me and by Jan 2014 you'll have a usable model, and by Jan 2015 it will be doing cartwheels. $45K will do it.

LOL

If I were responsible for corporate data the thought of storing it in the cloud would give me the heebie jeebies, too.