Re: Just say NO!
Seems like you "presume" wrongly - the EOC in Dublin is where MS cloud services for Europe are hosted presently (including CRM Online for example). Backup site is in Amsterdam.
So definitely inside EU laws, data protection borders etc.
It does seem that lots of small businesses are more than happy to move to the cloud for things like email and document sharing, especially in their early days so they can pay for things month by month, rather than raising and spending a big outlay up front. Also works well with the "BYOD" crowd too.
Selling SBS with these things already in has two problems- it means many firms would pay for things they don't need or want (either they don't see the need for the functionality or they already get it elsewhere eg Google docs, dropbox etc), and it makes it even harder to sell cloud services to someone that already paid a lot for an on-premises server that does roughly the same thing. Every SBS Standard sale is one more potential customer who will be harder to convince to move to the cloud later.
The assumption that all small firms even have a department called IT is far from reality. Those that do can always opt for Server 2012 without the extra layers of wizard-based config and actually manage the server themselves and be as control-freaky as they like about it. Choose the products you want on top like Exchange and Sharepoint and pay for only what you actually use.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
