Casey, yeah I guessed that already. What sense does it make to restrict Internet-based offers to certain countries? The Internet has no borders.

You can track the availability of our service in other markets via our blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/msonline/

Or via our marketing site:
http://www.microsoft.com/online

Regards,
Casey (MSFT)

Lukas, I agree that all these SaaS offers are more interesting for smaller companies. However, it is not really because on-premise software or hardware would be more expensive for them. Those small companies have to outsource their IT management, anyway. So they might as well outsource the whole thing. But I doubt that it will be cheaper that way. The share of hardware and software costs is usually the much smaller part of the TCO. The costs for the IT pros is the expensive part and they won’t get cheaper just because they will be working somewhere on the cloud. Every time we outsourced parts of our IT it became more expensive which is only logical. Outsourcing means that you not only pay the external IT pros, but also their management, the secretaries, their rent, etc.

Leonardo, I think your stance is most common among IT pros. Many had in one way or another experiences about similar offers before and so they are cautious. Only time will tell if cloud computing will ever get beyond the hype phase.

Well, of course, there’s cost. Might even work out short-term and be a reason why execs will buy it. But as a technical superior solution? I don’t think so.