I've been reading a new survey of mobile developers from VisionMobile. Around 400 developers were surveyed, and the platforms covered were iPhone, Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Java ME, Windows Phone, Flash, and the mobile Web.
The topic is significant. Companies everywhere are crying out for mobile apps, especially for Apple iPhone but increasingly for Google Android as well. The device+cloud computing model is today's big trend, and support for mobile devices in some form or other is becoming necessary for a wide range of applications and web sites.
The first notable fact is the extent to which iPhone and Android dominate. This chart on page 10 tells the story: there is little relationship between the device installed base and the number of available apps. Windows Phone, for example, has 75 million devices out there but only 13,500 apps; iPhone has 60 million devices and 225,000 apps.
The reason is that Apple has created a viable ecosystem for development, as well as a superb mobile platform. Much as I dislike the locked-down nature of that platform, and its Apple tax, I acknowledge and admire what has been achieved.Android has just 20 million devices but 72,000 apps. I'd guess that the quality of those apps is not as high on average, but it's still clear that iPhone now has competition.
If this paper is to be believed, Android will even pass iPhone. Android is identified as the most popular among developers, with around 60% using it versus 50% on iPhone. Why?
We believe that Android's lead in developer mindshare ahead of Apple's iOS is down to two factors: first the $99 fee developers have to pay in order to deploy their applications, an entry barrier which reduces the innovation from developing countries. Secondly, the very effective use of open source licensing as a marketing technique to attract developers to Google's Android.
Another factor is that Android apparently offers the best developer experience. In an appendix, the survey tests iOS, Android, Symbian and Java ME for coding, debugging, device emulation and support resources. Novices could create a simple app more quickly on Android. The coding effort was less; building 9 simple apps took nearly 3000 lines of code on Symbian, versus just under 1500 lines on iPhone and a little over 1000 lines on Android. Debugging is faster on Android. The survey comes up with the following claim:
Using the above data, we can say that when developing common applications, each hour of work for a given Android developer, irrespective of level of experience, equals 1 hour and 10 minutes for a Symbian developer, 1 hour and 20 minutes for a Java ME developer and approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes for an iPhone developer.
Contentious, no doubt, and a lot will depend on what sort of app is being developed. Still, a good result for Android.
Both iPhone and Android seem safe bets, but what about other platforms? Adobe Flash is an interesting one:
Our research further indicates that Flash developer mindshare seems to be in decline, despite Flash's installed handset base of more than 1.3B devices. Adobe's string of execution failures has meant that the installed base for Flash Lite is extremely fragmented, breaking the write-once-show-anywhere story for media brands who are Adobe's key customers. At the same time, Flash, the much-touted replacement for Flash Lite, was more than 18 months late, while Flash Lite shipments have stagnated, dropping from 43 percent to 15 percent of handsets sold from 1H09 to 2H09. This leaves Adobe with a rapidly shrinking window of opportunity, primarily on Android handsets, while having been banned from Apple's growing empire, and slowly seeing the adoption of HTML5, yet another replacement threat for Flash.
That's overly negative in my view. In favour of Flash is that it runs on the Web and desktop as well as on mobile, and will run across a number of mobile platforms. Even so, the research shows the pressure on Adobe to deliver mobile Flash, which will not be in the hands of the public until Android 1.2 "froyo" is availble on devices; and the Apple problem will not go away.
Symbian is in trouble too; in fact, since Nokia is now moving to MeeGo for smartphones, it now has little interest for developers. Some observers think Nokia should go to Android instead.
Java ME? Windows?
The vast majority of Java ME respondents have lost faith in the write-once-runanywhere vision. Moreover, anecdotal developer testimonials suggest that half of Windows Phone MVP developers (valued for their commitment to the platform) carry an iPhone, and would think twice before re-investing in Windows Phone.
That strikes me as accurate. Predicting the future is hard though. Google Android came from nowhere; it is possible that a couple of years from now different patterns will have emerged.
For now though, it's iPhone and Android all the way.
The iPad has just launched in the UK, queues are long, stock is short, and it is yet another successful new product from Apple. The iPad has frustrations, like no Adobe Flash support for web browsing, no Java, no printing, and the general sense that you do things the Apple way or not at all. Still, users love it and are willing to pay for it, and in the end that is what matters.
Does this shiny gadget have any relevance to the more humdrum world of business IT? I think it does, especially when taken together with other factors. Here's a remark from Apple CEO Steve Jobs from an informal email conversation with Ryan Tate:
The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.
Yes, it's a Bob Dylan reference; read the entire thread to see why. Jobs is marketing his company's stuff, of course, but a few days later the stock market put some solid evidence behind his claim. Apple's market capitalisation surpassed that of Microsoft for the first time since 1989. Microsoft remains more profitable; but the figures reflect the market's judgment that Apple has better prospects for growth.
Another sign of change comes from one of Microsoft's most important partners, HP. At the end of April it acquired Palm, and with it the WebOS operating system for mobile devices. Whether HP can make a success of WebOS is uncertain; it will not be easy going up against Apple and Google Android. What is more significant is the implication that HP has finally lost faith in Microsoft's ability to get it right in mobile.
Despite some positive buzz around Windows Phone 7, Microsoft did not help its case when it announced a major reshuffle in its Entertainment and Devices division on May 25th. This follows the bewildering launch of the Kin phone - bewildering because it seems right out on its own in terms of strategy - complete with typical Microsoft flaws according to this thoughtful review:
But the obtuseness of this user experience doesn't stop with the Spot -- it permeates the entire interface as though decisions about how things should work were made almost arbitrarily, without anyone stopping to test them in the real world. The Twitter implementation is a great example of that. You can add your Twitter account to the phone and see updates from people you follow, and you can update your status from the top of the Loop... but that's all you can do. You can't retweet something, you can't send a direct message, you can't go to single person's feed to see all their updates, and you can't even open a link in a Twitter message from the Loop!
Windows Phone 7 will have to be much, much better if Microsoft is to claw back any ground in mobile.
I digress. All that matters is that the world is changing, and looking less Microsoft-shaped with each passing day.
In saying that, I don't mean to diminish the excellent work which I see coming out of some parts of Microsoft - Visual Studio 2010, for example - or to ignore the continuing dominance of the company in many areas of business IT. Many companies still standardise on Windows, and Microsoft Office remains the only productivity suite I come across in work.
All true, but the two great IT trends of today are not centred on Windows and Office. One is mobile, the other is cloud computing; and of course there is synergy between them. Apple's iPad is a further advance for mobile, and will drive increasing mobile data usage and increasing demand both for iPad/iPhone applications and for web applications that work well on those devices.
I've been testing Microsoft's new Office 2010, along with its equally important companion SharePoint 2010, and trying to decide where it lies between brilliance and disaster. It's certainly an improvement on Office 2007. I was relieved to find that Outlook 2010 performs much better than Outlook 2007 did on its first release. Still, the perenniel question with Office is whether you will actually notice the difference, other than a slightly changed colour scheme, as you get on with typing documents in Word and calculating spreadsheets in Excel. While there is the usual laundry list of new features, there's nothing here as dramatic as the switch from menus to the Ribbon in Office 2007.
The real difference lies elsewhere, in how Office is entering the realm of cloud computing. The likes of Google and Salesforce.com have a straightforward proposition: ditch your desktop applications, store everything on our servers, and run your applications in the browser. Microsoft cannot afford to take that line, since Office is its biggest source of income after Windows itself. It has come up with something more nuanced, offering what it hopes are the most beneficial aspects of the cloud without displacing desktop Office.
Therefore we have Office Web Apps, with in-browser creation and editing of Office documents, but still tied to the desktop applications if you need to go beyond basic features. Office Web Apps can live on Microsoft's servers, such as SkyDrive and the recently announced Facebook tie-in docs.com, or on your own servers as a feature of SharePoint 2010. You can use them from various browsers on Windows, Mac and Linux. Suddenly, opening and editing that .docx or .xlsx - these being the controversial Open XML formats - on Linux is not such a problem. I was pleased and surprised by how much the Web Apps improve SharePoint and change the way I use it.
At the same time, as I dug into the Office Web Apps, I found more and more frustrations. The Office Web Apps use the very same formats as desktop Office, but not all their features are available. For example, you cannot insert a new sheet into Excel via the Web App. In fact, there are so many things you cannot do that listing them would take many pages. That doesn't mean the web apps are useless, they are fine for the basics. Microsoft's solution if you need an unavailable feature: just open them in desktop Office. But what if I'm on Linux? Tough.
This same issue leads to problems which are close to being bugs. Let's say I'm in an Internet cafe using a machine that does not have Office installed, you are in the Office, and we are happily collaborating on an Excel spreadsheet - Office Web Apps even lets us edit it simultaneously. The spreadsheet is nearly done, you feel it needs a little jazzing up, and you open it in Excel to add some Word Art. Oops. Not only is the Word Art invisible to me, but I can no longer edit the spreadsheet. Sorry, says Excel Web App. Incompatible features.
It's something that cannot happen in Google Docs, or Adobe's Acrobat.com, where the web application is the only one that you use. I can see this kind of thing causing endless frustration. Note too that you get no warning when editing a document in a way that introduces web app incompatibility.
Office Web Apps is something we did not have before, and you can see it as glass half full, or glass half empty. Personally I expect to use the web apps, and if they help bring an end to the terrible practice of collaborating by emailing documents to all and sundry, I will be grateful.
Nevertheless, as a cloud offering the Office Web Apps are somewhat broken. It will be fascinating to see how this evolves. My guess is that the Web Apps will improve over time, to the point where installing desktop Office becomes unnecessary for many of us. Microsoft may not like the sound of that, but it is better for the company than the alternative, which is not using Office at all. Never bet against the cloud.
Mobile devices are today's development battleground. Timing is everything: I recall Borland's 2003 conference when it introduced an extensive mobile development strategy based on the ill-fated C++ BuilderX, with SDKs from Nokia and Symbian. The sessions drew sparse attendance and Borland later abandoned the product, returning to the Windows-oriented C++ Builder.
So what changed? In part, devices have become more powerful and mobile internet access faster and more pervasive, making the platform more attractive. A bigger factor though is Apple's iPhone. In hindsight, the mobile vendors and operators made mobile development too difficult, with fragmented platforms and locked-down devices. Microsoft has had some success extending Windows to mobile devices, for enterprise development in either C++ or .NET, but its market share is too small, the devices insufficiently well liked, and the deployment obstacles too great. Java had some success too, but write-once, run anywhere never really worked for mobile.
Enter iPhone, with a single platform and easy deployment through the App Store. The "easy deployment" part has to be qualified, since developers have been confronted with limited access to the device, restrictions on what they can develop, and an opaque approval process; but it has worked, and the potential of the mobile platform - about which we have known for years - is now being unlocked.
Other vendors are belatedly rising to the challenge. I'm just back from Nokia's Qt Developer Days, and saw the energy the company is putting into creating a cross-platform, open source mobile development framework. Windows Mobile, Maemo and Symbian are on the immediate roadmap. On the deployment side, Nokia has the Ovi store. I've also been at Adobe's MAX in Los Angeles, where broad mobile support for the Flash runtime was the big story. The Flash runtime is not coming to iPhone yet, but Adobe has a native compiler for Flash applications which targets iPhone. Adobe also has app store plans. Google Android is another platform where all the pieces are in place, and Palm Web OS a new hopeful on the scene.
This means developers now have numerous choices for mobile development, as well as more pressure to create or extend applications to embrace mobile clients. It is not an easy choice. An AJAX application will work on the iPhone and elsewhere, but there is no offline support or access to device features, and the capabilities of mobile browsers vary greatly - though Webkit is becoming a standard on non-Windows devices. Native iPhone works great on Apple's device, but nowhere else. Flash is becoming interesting, but devices with 10.1 will not be around until next year and it is an unproven platform in a mobile context. Windows Mobile will trudge on, though Microsoft's mobile story seems particularly incoherent at present and I expect declining market share. Java on mobile has not gone away either; and Google Android is pretty much a Java platform. C++ will always be attractive for lean, fast applications.
It is fun to pick winners and losers, but impossible to tell how all this will shake out. Here's two safe bets. The first is that mobile, internet-connected applications are in many ways the future of the client. The second is that focusing on a strong web services API (of whatever flavour) is the right place to start. What's your mobile strategy?
Tech media pundits talk incessantly about migration to the cloud, but it is always interesting to get reports from the trenches. Two recents ones interested me. The first is from Patrick McKenzie, who sells a niche Java application. He's just posted a detailed and entertaining blog entitled Why I'm Done making Desktop Applications. His application exists in both desktop and online versions, and he says he was a staunch defender of the advantages of desktop apps - "You can keep your Google Docs, Excel is superior in almost every way." Then he made an online version of his app with if anything fewer features, and tracked the statistics. He discovered the following:
His conclusion:
The next major release will almost certainly be its last. The webapp, and my future webapps, seem to be much better investments.
Does any of this apply to corporate development? It's true that life is easier in some ways if you do not have to make a sale; and there are still some things that desktop applications do better, like integrating with Microsoft Office through COM automation, or continuing to work offline on the train or plane - though see Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson's You're not on a plane for a contrary view.
Still, many of the other factors do apply. Lower support requests, zero installation, accurate usage monitoring - all these things have immediate financial benefit.
It is no longer web application developers who have to justify their case, but rather those who still advocate desktop development.
If you need any further persuading, take a look at this survey of 1400 Microsoft's small business customers by Accredited Supplier. Apparently 62% prefer business applications that work through a browser, and only 18% prefer desktop applications. The more chilling news for Microsoft is that 13% actively intend to switch to Google Apps - with all that implies for sales of Windows server, Exchange, and Office - while only 36% are sure that they are not switching.
All that cloud talk is translating rapidly into business decisions. I'm not sure whether the future of the business application client lies more with AJAX and HTML 5, Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flex, or something else; but for sure it is not a desktop technology.
Eclipse Galileo is out now. It is remarkable: 33 projects and 24 million lines of code, according to the press release. Perhaps the two biggest features in this release are support for Mac Cocoa - in order words, proper Mac support - and PHP development tools. All open source, all free.
Unsurprisingly, Eclipse appears to be the most popular Java development tool, and if you extend that to IDEs based on Eclipse, its dominance is overwhelming. Its obvious rival, Netbeans, has improved greatly in the last few years and may be better for some purposes; but it looks unlikely to catch Eclipse, and the impact of Oracle's impending acquisition of Sun is unknown.
Eclipse has also influenced other development tools, forcing vendors to offer more for free and to improve their extensibility. You can see this effect in Visual Studio, for example, with its Express editions and both technical and licensing enhancements to its extensibility in recent times. Microsoft may say that this would have happened anyway, but I am doubtful. Eclipse changed the game.
Still, there is something that I've always found intriguing about Eclipse, which may be a weakness in its business model (if a free platform can have such a thing). I put this to Executive Director Mike Milinkovich and he responded robustly, which I like because it usually means I've asked a good question.
Eclipse is a a tools platform, not an IDE, and member companies build their own products based on the shared platform. Examples are Adobe with Flex Builder, IBM with Rational Application Developer, Zend with Zend Studio, and Embarcadero with JBuilder. Each of these companies has a dilemma. The more they invest in the shared platform, the more they collectively benefit by getting features that they do not have to build on their own; but the better the shared platform gets, the more difficult it is to differentiate and sell their commercial products. I asked Milinkovich about this tension and he interrupted me:
That's not a tension, that's exactly the way Eclipse is designed to work. That is the Eclipse business model. Our licensing model and our business model are geared around the notion that we're building an open source platform which then people build products on top and differentiate in the marketplace based on what they do on the proprietary side.
Although Milinkovich says it is "not a tension", Embarcadero CEO Wayne Williams complained about this very thing, telling me that IBM is now pulling back from investment in Eclipse and reserving the best new features for its own products - which, whatever the truth of the matter, IBM has every right to do.
An additional factor is the difference between vendors like Google, which has an Eclipse plug-in for App Engine, but is only concerned to promote its platform; and those like Embarcadero whose business is selling tools. Vendors like Google can improve Eclipse without any threat to their business.
Eclipse is wildly popular, but came last in a recent Software Development Platform survey of developer satisfaction by Evans Data. To be fair, all the products won a reasonably good rating, so we should not infer that Eclipse is poor; it is not. I can understand, though, why some member companies may be happy to see Eclipse rated as good, but not too good, giving them space for their Eclipse-based products; and if this is the case, it may limit the extent to which Eclipse is likely to improve.
The Web is broken in lots of ways, one of which is that its content is mostly unstructured. Most web pages have a title and some content, and that is about all you can assume. Researchers and standards bodies have been trying to impose more semantic order on the web since its earliest days, by adding metadata so that web crawlers can parse the content accurately, rather than relying on inference. These efforts have had little success outside academia; and the semantic content of typical pages has arguably got worse rather than better, thanks to the trend towards richer pages using JavaScript and Flash, rather than simple text marked up with HTML.
Microformats are a softer approach to adding metadata, using standard HTML but with conventions that identify certain types of content, such as name and address details (hCard), events (hCalendar), or even CVs (hResume). If you have web pages that include content of this type, you can usually mark it up according to the microformat specification without damaging the appearance of the page. The benefit is greater searchability; in fact, you could think of it as a kind of search engine optimization.
A good example is hReview, a draft specification for reviews of anything from products to events or places. If I'm considering a purchase, I often type in a search for "product x review", and then find myself sifting through lots of useless results, because all the ecommerce and affiliate sites know we do that kind of search, and pretend to have reviews when really they do not. If all the sites used hReview I could do more precise searches, perhaps specifying "only reviews in the last 12 months", and sorting by rating, and the search engine could structure the results nicely so I can see at a glance the author's name and an extract from the review itself.
Simple standards like this can have a huge impact. The whole blogging revolution was driven by RSS, which itself is a kind of microformat for news.
The snag is, they have to be widely adopted to be useful. I first wrote about microformats in 2006, but despite my enthusiasm they have had little impact to date. That may be about to change. On Tuesday May 12th the mighty Google announced a new feature called Rich Snippets, which means it will be exposing microformat metadata in its search results, along with another more generic type of metadata called RDFa.
It all sounded familiar to me, as the previous weekend I attended Yahoo Hack Day in London, and heard about its Search Monkey project which also uses microformats and RDFa. Yahoo was there first; but it is Google that has the power to shake up the web.
Should you care about microformats? If Google is serious, then it will have a wide impact. Business names and locations should be marked up with hCard, for example. Anyone designing an Ecommerce site with user reviews should be looking at hReview. Although the list of microformats Google is taking note of is small at the moment, if it catches on that list will inevitably grow.
The message that Google is giving an advantage to sites that use microformats and RDFa will be heard loud and clear by the SEO community, and given the commercial importance of effective search ranking this could grow quickly.
Then again, I may be over-optimistic now (and yes, I do think it is a good idea) as I was in 2006. Watch this space.
Adobe's MAX conference in San Francisco this week was focused on what it calls the "Flash Platform", a technology stack oriented round the Flash multimedia runtime. The "platform" word highlights the fact that you can code for Flash and have your application run everywhere that Flash runs, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and some mobile devices as long as they are not from Apple. It is not a complete platform, being essentially an Internet client, though there are some server-side pieces such as LiveCycle Data Services, to simplify and optimize communication between Flash clients and Java middleware. You can also blur the distinction between browser and desktop with AIR, which runs Flash outside the browser and adds a local database engine.
So what's new? There was the usual set of announcements. The key ones are as follows:
AIR 1.5: an update to the desktop runtime which adds support for Flash Player 10 features such as Pixel Bender, for runtime graphical effects, and an option to encrypt local databases. There is also the SquirrelFish JavaScript interpreter - though this only comes into play if you are running JavaScript within HTML, rendered by WebKit, rather than ActionScript without the Flash runtime, which has its own just-in-time compiler. AIR 1.5 is available now.
A new version of Flex and the Eclipse-based Flex Builder IDE, code-named Gumbo. This has a new skinning and component architecture, more advanced text rendering, easier two-way data binding and a new Client Data Management (CDM) feature which from early descriptions looks reminiscent of a .NET dataset. You work with data on the client, storing updates locally, then zap the updates back across the wire in a single update operation. One thing that is not yet clear to me is the extent to which CDM requires LiveCycle on the server; I'll be sure to clarify this in a couple of weeks at MAX Europe (I was not present at the US event). The database aspect is significant, because so many enterprise applications boil down to CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) in one form or another.
Catalyst, formerly code-named Thermo, was previewed. This is a fascinating product which converts Photoshop artwork into Flex code; it also allows designers to create and preview a degree of interaction in their designs. Catalyst shares the same project format as Flex Builder. Again, I will be taking a closer look at MAX Europe. Here's a preview screen grab:
Cocomo (yet another codename) is a cloud effort from Adobe, focused on conferencing. Adobe hosts the services and provides Flex components to enable file sharing, text and VOIP (Voice over IP) chat, whiteboards, and data messaging; there is also user management built in.
Alchemy is a tool that converts C/C++ code to ActionScript, for execution within the Flash player. It's intended for re-use of existing libraries, not for general development.
Third-party announcements that caught my eye included Ensemble's Flex add-in for Visual Studio (though I was underwhelmed by the preview), and Zend's addition of AMF (Action Message Format) into its PHP Framework. AMF is a binary format that optimizes data transfer between servers and Flash clients.
Although none of these announcements is spectacular in itself, taken together they show the momentum behind Flash as a client for applications as well as video and multimedia, as I have mentioned here before. A good thing? Designers love Flash because of the freedom it gives them, along with the excellence of Adobe's design tools - Creative Suite 4 really is spectacular. Nevertheless, I have a nagging concern that if we adopt Flash rather than AJAX - interactivity in HTML and Javascript - for our next-generation clients, we are giving away the openness of the Web, because Flash is proprietary technology. I recommend this thoughtful post from Google's Brad Neuberg, which recommends not only open-sourcing the Flash runtime, but also integrating it more deeply with the browser and embracing web standards. There's little chance of Adobe adopting Neuberg's proposals, but he does a good job of spelling out the issues. Flash is compelling, as is Microsoft's Silverlight, but each is controlled by a single vendor. Do you think that matters? I'd be interested to hear your opinions.
I'm at the Salesforce.com conference in San Francisco, called Dreamforce. The slogan made me smile: the future is looking up. Perhaps it is; but up to which cloud? Microsoft Azure, announced with much fanfare last week at the PDC? Google Apps and AppEngine? Amazon's virtual machines on demand? Or Force.com, the Salesforce.com platform being plugged here? Although Salesforce.com is a CRM application, it is also a platform on which you can create other kinds of applications using the Apex programming language.
As you might expect, Microsoft's announcement is the subject of much discussion here at Dreamforce, with the Salesforce.com executives keen to explain why Azure (which CEO Marc Benioff derides as Azoon) is no match for its own cloud offering. Lindsey Armstrong, co-president EMEA, went so far as to say that Microsoft's effort is not actually cloud computing at all. Her reasoning: with Azure you write your own application and host it on Microsoft's servers. The maintenance of that application remains your responsibility. By contrast, the Force.com platform encourages multi-tenant applications.
The point highlights how the cloud computing buzzword is being used and abused by various vendors, to mean whatever they want it to mean. Underneath though, there are interesting issues. There is pretty much consensus in the industry that more data and more applications are heading for the Internet, with benefits including multi-device support, zero-install applications, availability from anywhere, off-loading of server maintenance, and scale-up on demand. There is no consensus though about what that cloud looks like.
It is easy to see the trade-offs here. The more you run your own code, the more control and freedom you have. On the other hand, the more you build on vendor-specific services, such as Amazon's S3 and SimpleDB, or Microsoft's SQL Services, or Google's Big Table database, the less code you have to write, but at the expense of less flexibility and greater tie-in to the cloud platform you are using. At the extreme is something like Salesforce.com where you share the maximum amount of code, but hand over almost all control to the third-party. App running too slow? Yell at Salesforce.com. App offline? Yell at Salesforce.com. Want to move to another cloud provider? Not easy.
To be fair, the cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com realise that their platforms stand or fall on what they deliver in terms of availability, performance and security. Salesforce.com, for example, has a pretty good record of late, though Amazon's is more spotty. Still, even if the platform is 100% robust there are business issues as well. I've talked to a number of Salesforce.com customers here, and while they are generally happy with the platform, I've heard concern about the cost. Once you commit to the platform, there are limits to what you can easily do if you become unhappy with it in future.
Benioff is open about this lock-in - he even used that word at the press Q&A, explaining how making the platform programmable was increasing his hold on his customers. Does that mean you should not use Salesforce.com? Not necessarily; it is not as if lock-in is anything new in our industry; and the platform itself is impressive. Nevertheless, it strikes me as a significant factor. The question "how do I move away" is important in evaluating next-generation computing infrastructures; and some clouds are harder to escape from than others.
