chrisn-585491 (6/10/2013)
People reject public "clouds" for very good reasons.
You forgot some. Some people reject this. Lots don't. I suspect a majority of companies/situations are not using cloud services, but that will change over time. Will it ever my a majority? No idea.
There are good reasons to reject the cloud, but there isn't a blanket reason to say yes or no.
As for the rapid re-versions (cha-ching!) in the MS product line: The ones that aren't fully committed to the MS stack, will find alternatives if they can afford to switch. There's a whole new generation of developers with OSS that are much more aggressive in pursuing clients.
Only natural as database products mature, and the alternatives meet some minimum bar. If we get more OSS products that work with .NET easily, especially things like LINQ/EF, I suspect we'll see more people migrate away. Overall, it's healthy to have choice in ecosystems.
Most companies are committed to the MS stack and can't convert due to years of legacy code, processes, training etc... Redmond can lead them onwards forcing changes year after year, even if it doesn't make business sense.
Basically it's a bow toward Mecca moment...
As for Azure leading the "box" version of the software, they have a lot of issues to fix in Azure before the veteran DBAs and developers outside of the "cloud" hype zone trust Azure.
I'm not sure this is true. What seems to be happening is that less and less (%-wise) installations are upgrading to new versions quickly. Instead it's a slow migration, with some new instances taking the latest version, but older instances being in use. There are still lots of SQL 2000 instances out there, on a 13 year old product.
I suspect what we'll see is people truly pushing their platform pieces (OS/database) to a 10+ year lifetime. With the maturity of the products, it's hard to say that SQL 2005/2008 won't cut it for the majority of your needs. There may be places you want newer things, but overall, for an RDBMS platform, those work great. My guess is that in 2020, we'll still see some 2005, lots of 2008/2008R2 installations out there and they will out number the 2012/2014/2016/2018 installations.