With it's choice of naming, a groan inducing Cloud Computing reference, Microsoft annouced Windows Azure.  We hypothesized a week ago that Microsoft might be making a direct counterpoint play to Amazons' offerings, and indeed Ray Ozzie at PDC2008 recognised their contribution saying "we are all standing on their shoulders."

The oddity in the announcement is Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  We are familiar with the Dyamics family of products, and CRM is the obvious cloud play, however it seems ill at ease in the Azure lineup. 

It's good to see Microsoft playing up the potential for the Azure platform to be used by other tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP or Python.  It will be interesting to see if these can be first class citizens in the Auzure ecosystem, but only time and implementation will tell.  What is sure is that however much any company, and Microsoft are no exception, about open-ness and cross compatibility; ultimately they'd still like to see the developer if not tied then certainly encouraged to stick with the same stack.

Pricing has yet to be announced, but will clearly play a large part in the initial success or otherwise of Azure.  We await details with interest.