>Then there is (really) the crucial issue of how will MS "deploy" the whole thing.

Whole thing? Dunno what you mean. MS makes tools, not apps, they know that, we know that. Web services themselves are solutions to the deployment problems we've had with previous versions of their tools.

>I still think that "the cloud" is intended to be a MS proprietary entity.

I'm starting to see it your way a little more here. In other parts of this thread I really tried to show that for Web services to succeed a huge chunk will be the ISP. I think the ISPs we have now, namely AOL, are nice and big, but nothing compared to what we'll see in the future. I also think MS knows this, and thats why the MSN push has been as "in your face" as it has.

So, the cloud is just the web as its always been, a collection of ISPs, but you're right in the fact that MS wants to be the grand daddy of all these ISPs. Will they? Well, they'll have a big chunk of users, but so will AOL, and thousands of others. I don't think it will be as "bad" as you think it will be, but we'll see.