Microsoft sets ‘cloud’ computing launch

At its annual partner conference in New Orleans on Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled pricing details and launch plans for Windows Azure, the “cloud” operating system that Mr Ozzie hopes will become the online analogue to Windows on the personal computer – a platform that supports applications on the internet. Speaking last month at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, the man who took on Bill Gates’s mantle as the company’s top technology visionary confessed Microsoft, when he arrived, was not ready for the challenges of the internet: “The PC was still at the centre of how people thought about everything. It was a bit scary. Part of his response was to bring together a small team of developers to work on Azure, treating it as a separate start-up.

Building the massive computing platform on which Azure depends, and refining it to run internet services with high efficiency and reliability, has ac counted for much of the development effort. Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief strategist, says there are now more than 1m servers in the company’s datacentres, making the Microsoft “cloud” one of the world’s biggest pieces of computing infrastructure. Even Mr Ozzie concedes that Amazon has set the pace in this new market although with technology giants such as IBM and Google also eyeing up the territory, the stakes are going up fast.

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