this will diminish Microsoft and kill most low-end IT jobs
Microsoft became powerful because their ecosystem allows mediocre people to keep well paid jobs, and these people are positioned resist change at the tactical level.
Cloud computing is disrupting this ecosystem by making competent IT personnel indirectly available to everybody, and the nature of utility billing makes the realized capital costs zero, which is like a narcotic for accounting departments everywhere. I have yet to see a VP of IT that can give a blow job to a CEO that gets a result like an Amazon EC2 invoice.
The droid that double-clicks to keep the virus scanner updated at your branch office doesn't have any way to prevent the whole replacement of his job with a disposable desktop computer and a faster Internet connection. I wonder how Microsoft will accommodate their hordes of MCPs and MCSEs.