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.

     

We don't recall much discussion about the choice of XP as a new windows naming convention.  However we do remember the volumes of snorting derision commited to paper (electronic or otherwise) when Microsoft decided to name its newest operating system "Vista".  Now at that point very little was known about the actual qualities of the product, but giving the haters so much ammunition with which to stoke their fires didn't seem like a good idea.

Anyhow, in a happy return to the traditions of yesteryear, Microsoft have announced via the Vista News Blog that they will be naming the new OS.  Wait for it!

Windows 7.

Now as soon as we can get our hands on a copy, we'll deliver a verdict on the product, rather than the name!

     

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.