In the cellar of Westminster Abbey in London, lies a lovely little café called the Cellarium, with all of the architectural design and feel of the Abbey. Of course, as it is in the heart of London, it has good tea as well. Earlier this week I was privileged to have a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion with Adrian Colyer, which led to 2 provocative questions: Will Microsoft open-source Windows?

A few weeks ago, a colleague showed me a technology that was fascinating in and of itself, but the strategic ramifications are even greater. For those of you who are technically inclined, look at these links: https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/dotnet/ https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/aspnet/ https://github.com/aspnet/home These are, respectively, the Linux docker images for running Microsoft .Net and ASP.Net apps, and the open-source repository. This is quite cool technically. After all, apps compiled for platform A, especially tightly closed platforms like Microsoft, usually aren't meant to run on platform B!

Yesterday, I read an article which claimed that 30% of people have never backed up, while the overwhelming majority are way behind on backups. In the early 1990s, about a year into my very first job out of college at a large global financial, I ran the server backups. Yes, in retrospect, I wonder what they were thinking giving that level of responsibility to the inexperienced kid I was. Either way, it was a great learning experience.

In our previous articles, we discussed what cloud is, the types of cloud services, and the difference between true cloud and "market cloud", or hosting. The big question is, so what? You are a software provider offering a cloud solution. Does it really matter if it is "true cloud", or just hosted? Isn't it just a difference in architectural design, a matter for your engineers but not your customers or your bottom line?