Here’s the Microsoft cloud operating system: Azure. You can’t help but wondering if this isn’t just a way to punish recalcitrant IT departments that balked at Vista by taking the decision out of their hands in the future.
Ray Ozzie Announces Windows Azure – “Windows in the Cloud” – ReadWriteWeb
In his keynote speech at PDC, Ray Ozzie gave some background to Azure. He started by noting that we’re in the early days of the services revolution and then sung some lines from the now familiar Microsoft refrain of software + services. He mentioned the recent online stories that cloud computing may be over-rated (Larry Ellison and others). In response, he said that there is a trend of “the externalization of IT”, and that rich forms of customer interaction are evolving – community interaction, wikis, blogs, etc. “The web has become a key demand generation mechanism”. Further, Ozzie said that “a company’s web presence has become critical to a company’s overall business”.
