Excellent questions Bob. Last year I wrote a rsiees of blog posts on technology adoption of virtualization technology in different computing classes. Virtualization is a critical step in the direction of cloud computing, and there is a Gorilla in that technology, on vendor who has more than half of the market share, in fact practically the whole virtualization technology market is server by only 3 vendors. This also has an impact on your previous post on standards. Sometimes standards bodies define the terminology, architectures and protocols of a new technology, but sometimes the defacto’ standard arises from the market gorilla.Even with a gorilla in the key enabling technology, I hope that there will not be a gorilla in the public cloud computing service providers. I also hope that there will be a significant proportion of these providers based in Canada. I attended an Open Data hackfest in Ottawa earlier this year. Open data mashups run on cloud service providers. I could not find anyone in the room who cared about where this data resided or where the application executed. Part of the cloud computing paradigm is that we don’t care where the application physically runs. This is a whole other subject, but if cloud computing becomes the dominant computing paradigm (and I think it will), then Canada should be the physical host of a good proportion of these services. IBM has built a cloud computing service in Canada. It would be good for the Canadian economy if we were a net exporter of cloud compute cycles.