Windows Cloud OS and Office Live Lite Office apps. Well, Ballmer is turning out to be quite the hype machine himself, releasing the industry buzzhounds with his Windows Cloud pre-announcement this week. Finally, something juicy to speculate and write about. The shine wore off Google Chrome long ago, and I'm getting tired of waiting for Congress to pass my individual bailout package. Hints of Windows Cloud and Office apps in the cloud are more than enough to light up the speculation afterburners until Microsoft WPC gets here on the calendar.
I suspect what we'll see is a Windows Server 2008 recast with features that make it much more easy to deploy online S+S or SaaS applications, and some nice tasty servers running Windows Cloud in Microsoft data centers, just waiting for your .Net application bits to arrive and present to the Internet. Amazon EC2, Google Web Engine, Salesforce.com... move over. Redmond's joining the SaaS club.
Lets face it, for Microsoft to deliver Office applications in Live format to compete with Google Docs, Microsoft has to solve the problem itself of deploying applications in the cloud. And you do remember Microsoft's in the hosting biz didn't ya? You didn't think they had all those cows surrounding Microsoft's new data center in Iowa loading servers with software for nothin. It's no coincidence Windows Cloud and basic Office apps in the cloud are rolling over the plains at the same time to an Internet near you. Now, could Live Mesh have a play in this announcement somewhere here? I wonder... It's been a while since we've heard any new news about Mesh. We'll have to stay tuned with that one.
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