London (UK) - Microsoft will soon unveil a new platform for web-based applications dubbed "Windows Cloud," possibly as early as next month, chief executive officer Steve Ballmer said during a conference with of IT managers in London earlier today. The software is separate from the Vista successor “Windows 7” and will not be an actual operating system that end-users will be able to run on client PCs. Instead, Windows Cloud is aimed at web developers who are looking for cloud-based technologies to create next-gen web applications. Or is it more?

Windows Cloud is interesting initiative to position Microsoft in emerging cloud computing segment, where computing power is delivered over the Internet to a user's browser that in fact runs web application and effectively replaces today’s client operating system environment. Other companies, most notably Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others, are building their business on top of cloud computing,  but Microsoft has been largely absent from this space – with the exception of a few Live-branded services for consumers and businesses.

Microsoft is expected to be aggressively pushing its cloud initiative over the coming months as it rolls out new offerings targeted at enterprise users and developers. The company has been on a shopping spree since last year, spending serious money, allegedly hundreds of millions of dollars, to pimp its datacenters.

Microsoft maintains that cloud computing cannot replace desktop computing. Instead, the software maker proposes an “S+S” model (short for software-plus-services), where an online service basically becomes rich extension of desktop applications. Of course, software maker is not ready yet to abandon desktop computing because its empire mostly relies on revenues coming from Microsoft Office and Windows sales. Nevertheless, it is preparing for such scenario and first examples of the firm’s strategy can be seen in its Office “Equipt” subscription offering.

Online components for SharePoint, Exchange and Dynamics Customer Relationship Management are in development, according to Ballmer. He noted that users will be soon able to do simple editing of their Office documents at public Internet terminals, but he refused to provide details of the new service. "That's all I can say on that," Ballmer said.

The CEO said that Google Docs, the online-only office productivity suite from Google, has "relatively low usage," which is due, according to Ballmer, the small feature set. "We want software more powerful than software that runs in a browser," he said. However, the rapid growth of online services is paving the way for the next-generation of web applications that could, for example, compete on features and performance with Microsoft Office on a client PC.

It seems reasonable to assume that Microsoft is preparing itself for a possible trend towards cloud computing. With that in mind, the Windows Cloud initiative could be seen as the first step towards future Windows operating system that will be delivered to end-users as a cloud service.
      

Live Mesh

Oct 01, 2008 17:34     

You can already check out the base platform for all of this, it has been out in a "Tech Preview" for a few months now. In its current limited form it is still quite useful and lets you use Remote Desktop on any of your Vista or XP machines. www.mesh.com
Mike report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +2

Pay attention!

Oct 02, 2008 08:37     

Did you catch that, Mr. Zibreg? "Microsoft maintains that cloud computing cannot replace desktop computing." Web browser != operating system.
Ben report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1