Microsoft announced it will launch in 2018 Coco Framework, a framework which will enable companies to adopt blockchain technology. One of the issues it tries to address is the privacy of the transactions. Companies are not interested to make public all theirs smart contracts, so Coco framework allows encrypted contracts. In order to make the blockchain as distributed as possible, the parts involved in transactions can assign third parties to see transactions in order to ensure the platform sanity.
I'm not sure is companies like Microsoft have a really good understanding of what blockchain is, and what distributed means, but the news itself proves that blockchain is going to be big.
