>The number of people who misunderstand Azure is astounding. Want to run Java apps? Php? Ruby? Azure can do that. Don't want to manage your data center? Azure can do that. Want to manage parts of your infrastructure? Azure can do that. Do you need message queuing? What does it take to do that in Linux in your data center? Azure can do that. Do you run a web store and need to ramp up for the holiday season? Doing it yourself? Oh you need to buy a bunch of machines just to handle the surge, then they sit idle the rest of the year. Azure can solve that.
>
>If the cloud is mistake, then Rackspace, Amazon AWS, and many others are just a waste of time and money.


I am not saying that various cloud resources do not have purpose. They do for some companies and some purposes but as mainstream way of doing things ? Dunno I might be weird but I would NEVER (ever) keep my servers/data anywhere but at my own premises.
And yes I would buy more servers even if I have seasonal variation in space/processing need. When you plan your resources then you do it by taking into consideration seasonal peaks as well. In fact that is more normal I would say.

I am NOT using Linux. I cannot use VFP there so it is no go for me. My son does however. He has an android phone and
ex vista laptop that runs very nicely with Linux. His new laptop will very likely be Linux. So tech story about 3 generations in my family goes like this;
My father had his business systems done on IBM platform (remote terminals), I am so far both M$ fan/slave whereas my son
is hooked on Android/Linux (teenager). We will see what future brings, but M$ will have to do hell of a lot better then 'cloud' if they want to stay along for the next generation.

Cheers :)