Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) spoke in London about the companies online software as a service strategy, specifically targetting the developer community, refering to it as "Windows Cloud".  The implication, as noted in an InfoWorld article, was that this would be a toolset although InfoWorld rather odly refers to it as an OS.  We suspect this may turnout to be an online environment, similar in some senses to Microsoft Popfly, but presumably considerbly more heavyweight and business rather than consumer focused.

Microsoft are clearly concerned about the end-around of their entire technology stack offered by products such as Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).  Strata may be the name given to this hybrid strategy/toolset solution, as it was released presumably accidentally (On the PDC website) and subsquently expunged and replaced with the less exciting moniker of Cloud Computing.  We await developments from PDC with some interest.