Today, I attended Amazon's Cloud Computing Conference, taking place this week in Manhattan. The highlight of my day was an extended lunch with Saleforce's Peter Coffee (himself a former journalist). During our conversation, Peter made a very insightful remark about the prospects of vendor lock in happening in the cloud: "We are locked into our customers."

That might sound like a colloquialism, but it is essentially true. Salesforce has made a massive capital investment into its data centers. Without customers, it has no way to generate revenue from that investment.

With all of the talk about "open clouds" making rounds over the past week, Peter was very open discussing Salesforce's interoperability with other clouds (private and commercial), as well as what it would take for a Salesforce customer to migrate away from its services. It was time well spent, and I look forward to sharing details of our conversation with you.

In fact, those are questions that I am asking every company that has or intends to have a cloud application platform. I hope that everyone is as transparent as Salesforce was today. My story will be filed later this week.