Once again, Microsoft is jumping on a bandwagon waaaay too late. What is there in this "cloud computing" that solves an existing need? How many times does somebody need to come up with a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, flop on their face, and then Microsoft goes and tries to cash in on failure?

Perhaps if Microsoft didn't have billions upon billions in the bank, they would think about solving problems people actually have, instead of trying to figure out what to do with all of their cash.

BitTorrent?

Nice. Original. Could only be one thing. No danger of confusion.

ASP. Why hasn't someone used that acronym before now? OK, I'm off.

Hosted Exchange is just the start of a whole slew of services that will enable you to choose how much infrastructure you want to host and support vs. how much you want to have hosted for you. This is a VERY big issue for the majority of businesses today who don't have, nor want, the headaches of having to operate the systems to allow them to leverage the power of the internet.

If Microsoft (and any other technology vendor for that matter) didn't carefully explore where it might to tomorrow (TM), then they'd be out of business already.

Azure is (and will increasingly be) an extremely powerful infrastructure that has been carefully designed, taking into account Microsoft's experience of running not only one of the world's largest and most complex IT organizations, but also some of the world's largest online services (Hotmail, Spaces, XBox Live, etc).

...that Micro$haft keeps throwing inconceivable amounts of money at improbable ventures while studiously ignoring the elephant in the kitchen - that it's primary product is a steaming pile of dogshite. You can draw your own conclusions about why it continuously does so, but one obvious one is that even they don't have enough money to fix Windows.

"Ozzie said Microsoft would charge by resource consumption"

That's a good explanation why their OS has become such a resource hog... first they give customers a bloated OS that runs like a one-legged dog, then they start charging their cloud customers for the resources that are required to run all that bloat...

Cue Baldrick... "I have a cunning plan milord"...

Companies who are willing to give up their data and business processes for ransom to MS, don't deserve any better.

Paris, 'cause there's no Baldrick icon.

There are 2 parts to this "product":

- making it easier to develop web apps (Web 2.0 development tools)

- hosting the apps (Web Hosting)

This is nothing more than slapping the latest buzzword on the same old crap. There is nothing new about this offering - or Amazons offering for that matter.

Real cloud computing (seriously who comes up with these names), is nothing to do with web hosting or Software as a Service (SaaS). Cloud computing is about better utilization of existing data center resources by making it easier to manage how applications make use of the physical hardware (think balancing application workloads by moving them to make better use of the available resources without needing to re-provision / re-test everything end to end).

M$, Amazon, et al, are diluting the marketability of the real Cloud Computing technology to cover the fact, they have no idea what it is, and no idea how to do it. They are deliberately trying to create confusion in a desperate bid to stop from becoming irrelevant.

I only await more news about Microsoft's cloud offerings. Everyday there is something great coming out of the cloud and I am sure that there will be some interesting solutions presented here. Given that I publish a tech site http://newtechstuff.com this news is great for the future of new technological advances in the cloud.

Some healthy competition between Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others is good for tech growth.