Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, was in Berlin meeting with government officials this spring when a case kept popping up unexpectedly.How would the company respond, the officials demanded to know, to a judge’s ruling in New York that would give the American government access to a customer’s email sitting in an Irish data center? Germans were already furious about revelations that Americans spied on the country’s chancellor, Angela Merkel. And unless the ruling was reversed, one official told Mr. Smith, the German government would never rely on an American company like Microsoft to store its data in the cloud.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/technology/microsofts-top-lawyer-is-the-tech-worlds-envoy.html