PDC 2008: Azure is, and isn't, Microsoft's answer to everyone else's challenge

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Anyone who thinks Microsoft isn't capable of responding to a serious challenge doesn't know Microsoft. It's the familiar puzzle, put together the same way: Let others blaze the trail, then wait for an opening and leverage resources.

Windows Azure, depending not upon whom you ask but instead upon when you ask the question, either is or is not an operating system. It is not a kernel designed to operate on a single processor and provide access to resources on the local machine, so in that regard, it is not Windows.

But it will be a host of Windows enterprise-class applications such as Dynamics CRM and BizTalk Server and SharePoint, to the extent that customers will be able to purchase alternate licenses for any of these products depending upon whether they're deployed on their own hardware or in the cloud. So in that respect, it is very much Windows.

It isn't really Microsoft's counterpart to Amazon's EC2. Under the Amazon system, customers deploy a real image of Windows Server 2003 that's managed remotely using System Center or some other set of tools. Under Windows Azure, services and applications are hosted -- not images of operating system desktops -- with remote reporting, monitoring, and administration consoles displaying the status of those services. The underlying infrastructure there is maintained by Microsoft.

But it does (or rather, will) deploy network and distributed applications in a compelling way that will be competitive with the deployment model that Amazon is offering. And the prospect of deploying .NET applications in such a way that you basically set one option or click one button to move to the cloud, is a compelling feature that Amazon, at least for now, cannot offer.

And Azure is so obviously not anything Google would touch. But as a rich mechanism for enterprises to deploy their own applications, rather than continually beta test someone else's, Azure is Microsoft's answer to Google.

Microsoft is projecting that its online services division suddenly start enjoying significant profit surges, as soon as the next quarter, in this economy, in order to keep Microsoft's bad-weather strategy afloat. It had better get cracking.

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