clouds

Quoted: Dedicated servers, VPS, and web hosting on Linux and Windows servers. Including CentOS, Free BSD, Red Hat Linux, Net BSD, Windows 2008 and Debian.

Quoted: It would take over 4 and a half years before the licensed software became cheaper. By that time, I'm quite sure there would be another solution that could replace SharePoint, and the cycle would start again. We can quibble about the numbers, but you get the point. Plus, the numbers don't reflect that the SaaS solution is likely to improve and innovate faster than the licensed software by a significant amount.

Quoted: As part of Microsoft’s commitment to Interoperability, this open source project is an effort bridge PHP developers to Windows Azure. PHPAzure is an open source project to provide software development kit for Windows Azure and Windows Azure Storage – Blobs, Tables & Queues

AWS is soon going to have Windows instances available!

Quoted: Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a set of services that together form a reliable, scalable, and inexpensive computing platform 'in the cloud'. These pay-as-you-use cloud computing services include Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon FPS, and others .

These several "layers" of functionality potentially differentiate Microsoft from the competition.

Quoted: Our research identifies several layers of functionality ranging from system infrastructure to business process. Microsoft’s offerings include:
- System infrastructure services (Amazon EC2)
- Application infrastructure services (Force.Com & AppEngine)
- Application services (Exchange Online)

Quoted: We also hear that second half next year, Microsoft will announce their own Windows Azure on Premises solution, they’re already working with hardware manufactures (we know DELL for sure, but there are more). After the release of Windows Azure, the new Cloud Operating System at PDC this year (press release here), Microsoft is following their business plan to offer what they do best - software - to enterprises.

I agree. Interested how this plays out at Microsoft w.r.t. Azure.

Quoted: In this era everything is different - the stack, the players and the potential for value creation. Let's outline the basic shape of this emerging era, in particular defining what makes up the new stack

Check out the "Full Armor" case study. It illustrates how they, as an ISV that leverages Microsoft's cloud technologies, deliver solutions for Ethiopian school teachers.

I know it's a PR video, but it's pretty exciting and very well done nonetheless.