Clearly it is cloudy

That is the future. It isn’t about huge releases every couple of years. The traditional software model is going away, and it has been for quite some time.

Online Services – That’s what I’m talking about

Software Plus Services – that is where we are going. Microsoft realizes it is about the customer and staying plugged in. I’m always asking sales teams to let me speak with customers. I ask my audiences, “Tell me what I’m saying that is wrong!” Nature gave us two ears and one mouth – that’s the ratio I try to use. People love to give me their opinion, and I listen to it. A really smart developer, Andrew Lloyd, directed me to his web site, “MissedMemo.com.” Moving forward, it's about carefully listening.

We must provide targeted and well defined services

Microsoft must maintain a constant and continuous relationship with customers. Ray Ozzie has the right idea in my opinion – focus on one important customer at a time and figure out their specific needs. We must continually produce, update, and support a full panoply of services. There must be continuous integration and constant adaptation to customer needs. In the 1996 edition of The Road Ahead, Microsoft Chairman and former CEO Bill Gates laid out his vision of an interconnected world built around the Internet. Based on the premise that life will be transformed by the convergence of inexpensive computing and inexpensive communications. It is this convergence that is driving Software + Services and Cloud Computing to be responsive to customer needs.

The Azure Services Platform

Azure uses a specialized operating system, Windows Azure, to run its "fabric layer" — a cluster hosted at Microsoft's datacenters that manages computing and storage resources of the computers and provisions the resources (or a subset of them) to applications running on top of Windows Azure. Windows Azure, which was known as "Red Dog" during its development, has been described as a "cloud layer" on top of a number of Windows Server systems, which use Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V to provide virtualization of services.

Examples - What is currently available

That is easy, actually. One of our successful services is Windows Update, which automatically installs patches and bug fixes on users' operating systems. Hotmail, like all Web-based mail applications, is also a service. Virtual Earth? A service. As a company we must continually produce, update, and support a full suite of services that customers need.

Currently, the Azure platform includes five services — Live Services, SQL Services, .NET Services, SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services — which the developers can use to build the applications that will run in the cloud. A client library, in managed code, and associated tools are also provided for developing cloud applications in Visual Studio. Scaling and reliability are controlled by the Azure Fabric Controller so the services and environment don't crash if one of the servers crash within the Microsoft datacenter and provides the management of the user's web application like memory resources and load balancing.

FAQ at Microsoft for Azure

Click here for Azure FAQ

Windows Azure is not grid computing, packaged software, or a standard hosting service. It is an integrated development, service hosting and management environment maintained at Microsoft datacenters. This environment includes a robust and efficient core of compute and simple storage capabilities and support for a rich variety of development tools and protocols.

Windows Azure is designed from the ground up to be a fault-tolerant platform. Innovative technology called the Fabric Controller ensures that service availability is not affected even if individual servers fail. The Fabric Controller technology also makes it possible for developers to upgrade their application without any service interruption.

The innovative Fabric Controller technology in Windows Azure enables developers to scale applications seamlessly, as demand rises and falls.

The Windows Azure Fabric is a scalable hosting environment built on distributed Microsoft data centers. The Windows Azure Fabric Controller manages resources, load balancing, and the service lifecycle based on requirements established by the developer. The Fabric Controller deploys the service and manages upgrades and failures to maintain availability.

During the Community Technology Preview (CTP) developers invited to the program, which includes all attendees of the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC), receive free trial access to the Azure Services Platform SDK, a rich set of cloud-optimized modular components including Windows Azure, SQL Data Services, Live Services, and .NET Services, as well as the ability to host their finished application or service in Microsoft datacenters.

Each Windows platform is optimized for different customer scenarios and needs. The availability of both Windows Server and Windows Azure provides flexibility and choice for our customers to build applications on the Microsoft platform that best fits their needs.

Live Mesh – That’s also one of our future pillars, metaphorically speaking

The goal is to allow people to seamlessly synchronize all their information with as many people and places as they want, across as many devices (computer, phone, camera) as they want. That’s the primary objective of Live Mesh. We need to be an Internet company, much like a web startup – ad-supported, subscription based models that use viral distribution.

Changing business models

A business model is the method of doing business by which a company can sustain itself -- that is, generate revenue. The business model spells out how a company makes money by specifying where it is positioned in the value chain. I see our business models aligning with utility computing and subscription-based revenues for software services. The Utility Model or "on-demand" model is based on metering usage, or a "pay as you go" approach. Unlike subscriber services, metered services are based on actual usage rates.

With the subscription-based model, users are charged a periodic -- daily, monthly or annual -- fee to subscribe to a service. That might include office, Exchanged-based e-mail, etc.

Office – The Crown Jewels – Simply a service

This is a huge surprise to most. Microsoft will make even its legacy apps accessible via the cloud. For our entire history we have been deploying our esteemed Office suite on the desktop. Until now.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will get airlifted into the clouds and become a service as well. In this demo, an Excel spreadsheet is running in the cloud with almost all its functionality intact, including features like auto-complete and auto-formatting, as well as built-in collaboration and a way to link the spreadsheet results to emails and web pages.

Those are my musings for now

I will add to these commentaries as I embrace the future. Stay tuned and let me know what we could do better.