>...about some kind of Microsoft conspiracy...

Just to be clear, it's not JUST about Microsoft. I have used the words "Windows Azure-esque" and I have written about .NET specifically, but I recognize and refer to technologies along those lines, technologies which are designed, and have been designed from the beginning, to allow an almost seamless migration from local+remote execution to remote+remote execution with basically glorified web-browser like interfaces for presentation and UI.

It's what we had before in the earliest computers. We had mainframes and terminals. It's just now the implementation is far more powerful, and insidious, because there's power involved, money involved, control and domination involved. We also have enough manufacturing, compute and storage capacity to handle volumes of data, even at high speed Internet connections, and other related supporting infrastructures (legal system, marketing staffs, toolsets, etc.).

It's a well planned movement. And it is bigger than any one company or government. It's a coordinated effort from the top down ... that "top" being ... THE enemy of all of us.