Looks like there's a huge opportunity in the .NET game...one of those providers looks amateurish and the other isn't even running yet. I would definitely pursue that if I didn't have my hands full.
I noticed this too. We run on Azure but I would love to evaluate other options.
But, could someone really compete with Windows Azure and all the features that come with it? It would take a startup quite a bit of time and money to match services such as Blob Storage, Table Storage, Message Queues and Distributed Caching.
Perhaps those features aren't for everyone. I guess there is still a need for quickly and easily creating nodes running IIS.
People have used S3 even before hosting at EC2, and if you like, you can use Blob Storage without hosting at Azure too.
Table Storage, message queues and distributed caching exists in various flavors - and your point about not everybody needing these things are indeed true.
A common interface to avoid vender lock-in will be the next big step...
biasLogic runs in//across azure, amazon and also local remote servers depending upon need and technologies used. We focus on integartion across the cloud and cloud PaaS/SaaS and Developer API's - We make it easier for a developer or enterprie to move to the cloud and provide a way to avoid vendor lock-in at a cloud/IaaS level and are designed to work with existing PaaS platforms even though we are a PaaS in a way ourselves. (yes you can run locally inside your network if you want..) drop me a line personally at: scott.worley@biaslogic.com --> we are coming out of stealth in the next couple months.
