So I did say in a few presentations recently, that I'm dying to replace my slide of Microsoft Livemesh and Ray Ozzie's thoughts about cloud computing with something more cloud like. Well yesterday Microsoft unveiled Azure, a operating system for the cloud. From my understanding, its like Google App engine but using .net instead of python. They do say Python, PHP, Ruby, etc are coming soon.
I did sit and watch the Channel9 video where he explains the whole thing over 40mins and it does sound good but not ground breaking in my own mind. Could be useful for the backstage wild west server but I expect the community would litch me before I got close to suggesting it.
So after the cloud computing announcement of Azure, Microsoft went on to surprise us all with a consumer facing announcement that Windows live ID will OpenID 2.0.
Beginning today, Windows Live™ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider. You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!
I wonder if they ever plan to support access to there own services via openID?
But the biggest announcement was of course a demo of microsoft office live which is like google docs but microsoft office. Unsuprisingly Microsoft will still be selling copies of Microsoft Office 14 in shops.
So Microsoft have certainly put a foot in cloud computing but between livemesh, azure and officelive I'm not exactly wow'ed. More me too that trailblazing.