[Mr. Jazzy]

It’s also got a lot to do with money.
Microsoft, for one, is trying to curtail the piracy issue and sees the cloud as a way to keep the dollars flowing into their accounts and NOT the pockets of bootleggers.

[Erik Latranyi]

Nobody is a bigger advocate for the cloud than Google. Microsoft pales in comparison.

[zeugma]

It’s also got a lot to do with money. Microsoft, for one, is trying to curtail the piracy issue and sees the cloud as a way to keep the dollars flowing into their accounts and NOT the pockets of bootleggers.

Not just bootleggers. Virtualization has opened some people's eyes how horribly wasteful it is to have sinegle-purpose MS-Windows servers in their datacenters. You take a look at the stand-alone MS-Windows servers and you'll see a huge number of servers that are essentially running idle on modern CPUs. Not only is that wasteful in hardware, it has to be provisioned for power, cooling, space, and resources such as disk, and network.

The amount of waste this represents is staggering when you put it all together.

That's not to say that other types of computer systems can't be similarly wasteful, but more often than not, Unix and other midrange platforms are not provisioned as single-purpose systems.