I found the last paragraph of the document the most telling.
Cloud platforms aren’t yet at the center of most people’s attention. The odds are good, though, that this won’t be true five years from now. The attractions of cloud-based computing, including scalability and lower costs, are very real. If you work in application development, whether for a software vendor or an end user, expect the cloud to play an increasing role in your future. The next generation of application platforms is here. (And Microsoft knows it.)Read the report here
http://www.davidchappell.com/CloudPlatforms--Chappell.pdf
