I agree with you that there is a big space for Azure based applications (especially in the mobile market) but I've always seen this as more of an organizational and process oriented problem than a technical one (in relation to their deployment models and realities) that I would lay more at the management level given how dependent it is on methodology and process. If I could define deployment parameters as tightly as I suspect an Azure based provider can ....ahh... where was I? Oh yeah, I also think we've been burned by the lofty promises of SANs and VM's so there's alot of blowback. They have only their marketing departments to blame for that.