A major concern about migrating to the cloud is vendor lock-in. The chief complaint is that, once a vendor is chosen, it is difficult to switch to another vendor without incurring additional switching costs. This has spurred discussion around standards.
Essentially, consumers want their cake and to eat it too; they want vendors to compete for their business but also want the ability to easily switch vendors should they see fit. From a vendor's perspective, making proprietary APIs available to customers helps reduce the likelihood that they will go to a competitor because of the cost to re-architect their application. Similarly, storing large quantities of data in the cloud ensures higher customer retention because of the high(er) cost of transmitting data from one vendor to another (it is significantly cheaper to get data in than out). And, "Data doesn't like to move". (Quote attributed to an unknown attendee at Cloud Connect.)
From a purely hypothetical and selfish perspective, it is not impossible that vendors would prefer a situation where APIs remain proprietary eliminating portability of applications much like the situation with data storage. It seems that, assuming that standardization is inevitable, storage will be the game winner for many cloud vendors.
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