Abstract some development complexity and do a little of the heavy lifting, and in return you can ask to be The Platform. In many respects, the cloud is Visual Basic all over again, except with hardware and scaling crammed in as well. For all the success of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (what I’ve called instance clouds) play that is Amazon, more of the emerging platforms are Platform-as-a-Service (what I’ve called fabric clouds) offerings than not. … If you can persuade developers and the businesses they work for to choose your platform, it may not be necessary to technically lock them in at all. What happens when you wake up one morning with a petabyte of data hosted in the cloud? How do you move that workload to a competing provider efficiently and without risking the data itself? The likely answer, unless you’re exceedingly unhappy with your cloud provider, is that you don’t. Like an Oracle database customer, you pay whatever they want simply because it’s less painful to.