Late last week, we watched the big names in the IT industry play their little reindeer games over a proposedOpen Cloud Manifesto put forth by IBM. I have to say, it wasn’t worth it. As far as Manifestos go, this one is pretty benign. Who cares if it was agreed to or drafted in secret — it doesn’t commit participants to anything.

No standards, no rules — merely a general idea that clouds should work together and data should be able to travel freely back and forth among clouds. The strongest sections note that clouds should be transparent in terms of offering up the location where a company’s data sits, and issue a call to avoid vendor lock-in.

Microsoft’s decision to leak and deride this most timid of Manifestosis like getting back at someone who gathers a few world leaders together to get them to all decide to “be nice to each other.” It’s a nice gesture, but it’s not going to change the way the world works, so why is Microsoft pissing on everyone’s efforts? Check out the intro to the Manifesto:

Continues @http://gigaom.com

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