Last night I had a lengthy discussion with an ex-Amazon staff who laughed when I said consumers hate lock-in and high exit barriers. He gave the example of Microsoft Office and asked “you really think people are going to use something else?” That seemed strangely upside-down and backwards as an analogy.

My point was exactly the opposite. A market of new products to be considered for future adoption will factor exit cost. Those who use Microsoft Office are the ones on traditional non-cloud environments. There is no real exit barrier to leaving Microsoft Office other than the cost of learning a new platform since the formats can be exported and imported, or even used as a current standard (e.g. Office 97 or RTF).

A new platform (e.g. Cloud Y applications), by comparison, may come with lock-in to a non-standardized format. That should and will give consumers pause before they convert to it. This was highlighted by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) as one of the top barriers to new technology adoption in their Cloud Computing Risk Assessment.

CTOEdge now carries this message as well. Their post neither mentions security as the primary barrier nor hides the fact that cloud technology can be hamstrung by (boiled down to?) management of virtualization.

If you get the sense that we’ve entered a period of pregnant pause as it relates to cloud computing in the enterprise, it might have something to do with virtualization standards.

Right now, there are two standards that many cloud computing advocates are tracking with keen interest. The first is the Open Virtual Format, which will make it a whole lot easier for application workloads to dynamically run on top of multiple virtual machines. The second is a set of virtualization management interfaces that is to be shepherded by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF)