Good Clouds

Posted on October 1, 2008

Hot on the heels of our post on opposition to cloud computing, Microsoft’s Ballmer today talked about a soon to appear OS to help developers write apps for the web.

He calls it “Windows Cloud.” I’m sure it will have a different name, but it is definitely not connected to Windows 7 which is under development.

This seems to be a first-effort at giving some sort of embracement to the cloud computing concept and recognition of its viability. Of course, don’t expect Microsoft to give up its livelihood of desktop software just because there is a lot of interest in working directly through a web browser.

What we can expect to see, I think, from Microsoft is an online service that allows some editing of Office documents with the heavier editing and creation levels being done on the desktop as always.

Microsoft is facing some pressure from Google, through Google Docs and Spreadsheets and to a lesser degree from some very good applications like Zoho.

They don’t feel pressured enough to make any drastic changes though, and I expect this move to be more of a nominal effort to show Microsoft is capable of putting a product in the clouds than any desire to really get seriously involved in it.