Good article in Business Week on Steve Ballmer, who I generally think has led Microsoft poorly due to an inability to see very far beyond Windows: “Steve Ballmer Reboots”. However, I was shocked by this:

Greg Papadopoulos, a venture capitalist and former chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, says people can get caught up in the sexy devices and services produced by the likes of Apple and Facebook and lose sight of the bigger picture: The vast majority of the $3 trillion spent per year on information technology comes from businesses. They have just begun a journey to modernize their operations and embrace cloud services. Papadopoulos considers it a two-horse race between Microsoft and Oracle (ORCL) to win the lion’s share of this transition.

To date, Oracle has done little more than announce it will get into the cloud business. CEO Larry Ellison was against cloud computing—“nonsense,” he called it at a Silicon Valley industry event in 2009—before he was for it. Microsoft, meanwhile, has mobilized millions of software developers by giving them tools to rewrite their software as cloud services. When it comes to building a true cloud platform for mainstream businesses to glom onto, “Microsoft is kind of the only play here,” Papadopoulos says. Only Google has a comparable vision that encompasses both consumers and corporations.

Uh, Amazon Web Services? If you’re discounting that when it comes to cloud computing, your article is junk.