LOS ANGELES--Microsoft's Hailstorm prompted an avalanche of criticism when it was proposed seven years ago, but developers seem to have few qualms with Windows Azure, which embraces many of the same notions.
With Windows Azure, Microsoft not only controls the operating system but also the data centers where the applications run and the servers where the information is stored. If anything, Microsoft's control has grown, not shrunk, from the vision that the company outlined in 2001.
So why the lack of uproar this time?
Timing is a huge factor. For one thing, Microsoft's image has changed dramatically from the one it had when Hailstorm was introduced.
"It was the evil empire against Java and open source," independent analyst Peter O'Kelly said. Even Microsoft's code name was off-putting.
"When you think Hailstorm, you think destroy my garden, not helping me," O'Kelly said.
A slide from Microsoft's introduction of Azure Monday at its Professional Developers Conference.
(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)The industry has also changed dramatically. Companies have gotten a lot more comfortable with the notion that corporate information can live outside a business' own data center.
"Salesforce.com is the big one that broke through that glass ceiling," O'Kelly said.
Microsoft corporate VP David Treadwell doesn't dispute the notion that there are elements of today's strategy that can be traced back to Hailstorm.
"You are implying correctly that Hailstorm was kind of before its time," he said in an interview.
Microsoft has also learned from its experiences, Treadwell said.
With Hailstorm, Microsoft insisted on owning the relationship with the customers. Now, the company is talking about the notion of federated identity and cooperating with OpenID.
And, while Microsoft is big, it is no longer the only behemoth.
Much of Google's vision is downright audacious relative to what Microsoft proposed with Hailstorm, O'Kelly said. "Fundamentally, their mission is very clear. It is to organize all of the world's information. You are part of the world's information."
Security and trust
Also, while the data may live in Microsoft's data centers with Windows Azure, it can also be encrypted and other measures can be taken to make sure that it stays proprietary.
Azure gives companies the ability to tightly control the security of the data, said Jordan Ellington, vice president of legal technology at global firm Transperfect. Companies can encrypt the data at the server and send it encrypted over Microsoft's network and unencrypt it at the client.
"We wouldn't let Microsoft actually host our data. We're just using them as plumbing," Ellington said. Whereas, "small companies are not threatened by the intellectual property issues because it's a cheap service."
"I don't see, for quite some time, large corporations putting all their information in the cloud; it's too attractive of a target," he said.
But businesses now have to evaluate not just the theory of whether allowing others to hold their data is a good thing. The reality is that, in many cases, large third parties may be able to do more to protect a company's data than some mid-size firms can do on their own.
"Organizations have come to say, 'let's compare it to practical alternatives as opposed to some Utopian ideal," O'Kelly said.
Ray Ozzie
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)Plus, Windows Azure is still at the community preview stage, so businesses will have time to kick the tires before it's even ready to host their mission-critical applications.
"It's no different from paying any other hosting company," said Troy Farrell, solutions architect for Operitel Corp., which provides software management services for e-learning. "I guess some people genuinely distrust Microsoft because of their size, like some people distrust Google, which is hosting and storing data in Google Apps and other services," he said.
Trust is indeed an issue with cloud computing, Ray Ozzie told CNET News earlier this week. But Microsoft believes that trust may help them in this area, particularly when it comes to competing with Google.
"Cloud computing is ultimately going to be, do you trust this provider to have more to lose than I have to lose as a company if they mess me up?" Ozzie said in an interview. Ozzie said Microsoft is well-positioned to garner that trust, both because of the scale of its investment and because it is putting its money where its mouth is--building its own Azure-based applications.
Still, Ozzie said he'd expect businesses to move in waves, first moving infrastructure type things and only later moving business applications.
Even those who don't really trust Microsoft have options.
"Microsoft never has to see anything you are doing," said Alberto Ramirez, a developer at consultancy Tallan. Information "can be encrypted on both ends. They're just passing it along."
Microsoft may also benefit from the constraints of a tighter economy.
"There is demand for this, especially now," Ramirez said. "IT departments are scaling back. This requires no IT staff and no server in a room. And the security is taken care of."
CNET News' Elinor Mills contributed to this report.
LOS ANGELES--With only a couple of examples shown Monday of programs running on Windows Azure, I started to wonder just how far along things are with the cloud OS.
In an interview, corporate VP Amitabh Srivastava tried to set me straight.
"Windows Azure is at an early stage," he said, "It is real, but it is at an early stage."
In addition to the BlueHoo application shown on stage, Windows Azure was used to build Microsoft's Live Mesh and is also being used to build the next generation of Live Meeting.
"Ultimately the goal is to move all our properties," Srivastava said.
Srivastava also explained another question that was in my head. What was up with his bright red sneakers? I suspected, correctly, that it had to do with the fact that Azure was code-named "Red Dog."
The version of Azure that Microsoft is rolling out now is a community technology preview that lacks a number of features that Microsoft is working to quickly add, he said.
In particular, only software written in managed code, essentially .Net, can currently run. Internally, the company has other types of native code running, with plans to offer that to outside customers sometime next year.
In honor of announcing Windows Azure, which had been code-named Red Dog, corporate VP Amitabh Srivastava sported these red sneakers with his suit Monday.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)Services also must be built on a set of pre-designed templates, he said, though Microsoft plans to add more templates and ideally, allow services that don't follow any sort of template. Also, for now, Azure services will be running in a single Microsoft data center (the Quincy, Wash. facility). Sometime next year, Microsoft will expand that to other U.S. data centers and eventually move overseas, though that brings with it its own set of geopolitical issues that Srivastava said that the company would just as soon wait to tackle.
Microsoft also expects it will take some time for businesses to move major applications to Azure. For now, the company would be happy if developers just start learning about Azure and playing around with its software developer kit, senior VP Bob Muglia said in an interview.
"Realistically, companies won't be deploying applications for a year or more but there is a lot to learn," Muglia said. "There are new things they need to learn, to understand."
LOS ANGELES--Microsoft has to do more than just convince businesses that it has the right vision with Windows Azure, its burgeoning take on cloud computing, according to Ray Ozzie, the company's chief software architect. Fundamentally, it has to get them to place a huge amount of trust in the software provider.
Ray Ozzie
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)"Cloud computing is ultimately going to be, do you trust this provider to have more to lose than I have to lose as a company if they mess me up?" Ozzie said in an interview with CNET News here Monday at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference.
Ozzie said that Microsoft is well-positioned to garner that trust, both because of the scale of its investments as well as the fact it is putting its own applications on top of this same infrastructure.
"Microsoft has both the capacity to invest and the willingness to be in that kind of a business and to give that kind of trust assurance to developers and to enterprises," he said.
Some types of things will move more quickly than others, in Ozzie's view.
"Infrastructure will be a no-brainer," he said. "The things where there isn't unique business value added to a given system--e-mail infrastructure is a good example, phones, live meetings. As long as we achieve the performance objectives and cost objectives... I see no reason why those won't move very quickly to the cloud."
Core business software won't get migrated so quickly, he said.
"In terms of business applications, it's really going to take longer... for a variety of reasons, including the risk profile," Ozzie said. "Some companies might do it quickly."
As for developers, Ozzie said some of their skills will translate, but applications will have to be rewritten.
"The day-to-day writing of code will translate fairly readily," Ozzie said. "Things that are fundamentally different tend to be at the application framework level. The fundamental assumption in Windows Azure is that there is no single point of failure. No computer by going down will take down your application. If your app is not written in that way...then fundamentally the application pattern does have to change."
Most applications will not run that way out of the box, he said. Those that have used Amazon's Web services will probably be further along than those simply used to writing traditional Windows applications.
"For somebody who has used (Amazon) EC2," he said, "it will be a lot easier to get up to speed because there are some of the concepts that are carried across."
The full Q&A is here: "What Ray Ozzie sees in Azure's cloud." See below for a video interview.
LOS ANGELES--Microsoft on Monday announced a version of Windows that runs over the Internet from inside Microsoft's own data centers.
Dubbed Windows Azure, it's less a replacement for the operating system that runs on one's own PC than it is an alternative for developers, intended to let them write programs that live inside Microsoft's data centers as opposed to on the servers of a given business.
"It's a transformation of our software and a transformation of our strategy," said Ray Ozzie, a computing industry pioneer who now serves as Microsoft's chief software architect. (For a play-by-play account of Ozzie's speech, see "PDC 2008: Windows Azure live blog.")
Ray Ozzie delivers his keynote address at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference.
(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)Microsoft first outlined a shift to "Live Services" at an event in San Francisco in 2005. The company has released a few things piecemeal, such as Live Mesh, but Monday's announcement marked the first real discussion of how Microsoft's disparate Internet strategies fit together.
The announcements come at the start of Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference here. On Tuesday, Microsoft plans to go into more detail on Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista, due out by about January 2010.
With the launch of Azure, Microsoft will find itself in competition with other providers of Internet storage and computing services including Amazon, Salesforce.com, and Rackspace.
Ozzie said he was tipping his cap to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for innovating the hosted computing model. Amazon "established a base-level design pattern, architecture models, and business models that we'll all learn from," he said.
Microsoft is making Windows Azure in preview form to developers, with a limited subset of the features that it plans to have in the product before its final release.
There weren't many details on how Microsoft will charge for Azure, saying it will be free during the preview period. Final pricing, Ozzie said, "will be competitive with the marketplace."
The company itself plans to offer businesses the option of running over the Internet the kinds of software that have traditionally run on a company's own servers. Microsoft already sells its Exchange corporate e-mail software in this way, but that is just the beginning, said Microsoft vice president Dave Thompson.
"All our enterprise software will be delivered as an online service as an option," Thompson said.
CNET News' Elinor Mills contributed to this report.
Server and Tools senior VP Bob Muglia talks about the benefits to businesses of Windows Azure.
(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)
Microsoft's cloud computing team discusses how a common set of tools can be used for developing applications for traditional Windows as well as for Windows Azure.
(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)
Microsoft's Dave Thompson tells attendees at the Professional Developer Conference that all of the company's enterprise software will be offered as an online service over time.
(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)
One of the biggest challenges in business software, whether it lives inside a company or is part of a hosted service, is making sure that only properly authorized employees have access to the data and applications. Microsoft discusses how its Federated Identity platform will work with the new hosted services.
(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)
Microsoft has been growing its share of the Netbook segment in recent months, but it's largely on the back of the company's older Windows XP product, rather than Windows Vista.
The trend toward the small, cheap notebooks has not been lost on the software maker, however. When the topic turns to Windows 7 at the Professional Developers Conference next week, I would expect the software maker to talk about an operating system that can run well on all manner of laptops, including the ultra-low-end.
It's just one of many topics expected to come up at the conference, which takes place in downtown Los Angeles next week. CNET News will be there in force with live blogs, analysis, and some really high-level executive interviews. You can find all our PDC coverage both now and during the show from our PDC special coverage page.
Most of the Windows talk at next week's show will come Tuesday, on day two of the event, while the first day's keynote speech is expected to focus on "Windows Cloud," or "Windows Strata," or whatever the company has decided to call its cloud-based operating system. Steve Ballmer mentioned Microsoft might have a trademark by the time of PDC, but my search Friday didn't turn up anything for Windows Cloud or Windows Strata.
Day two will also feature talk of Office 14, the next version of Office, with sources saying that the company will show off some features, including its ability to run inside a Web browser.
As for the Netbooks, it's a critical segment for Microsoft to be competitive in, growing far faster than the market as a whole. It's also the first slice of the desktop market where Microsoft has seen a significant level of competition from Linux.
After many of the initial models were Linux only, Microsoft has hustled back with versions of XP that can run on flash-based memory. As some of the Netbooks have started to come with traditional hard drives, some Vista models, such as HP's 2133, have also cropped up.
Microsoft has declined to comment on Windows 7 ahead of the conference. The company has said that it will outline the product in detail and give attendees a pre-beta version of the operating system.
Windows 7 and Windows Cloud may be the stars of Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference, but the next version of Office has also landed a role in the production.
Office 14, as the product is code-named, will be discussed at next week's event, with attendees likely to get a peek at a couple of its features, according to sources. Unlike Windows 7, though, folks shouldn't expect to leave Los Angeles with a copy of their own.
In particular, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has talked recently about the idea that the next version of Office will be able to run in various modes, including over the Internet.
"We will rewrite Office to work in a browser," he said in an interview with Britain's Computer Weekly.
Microsoft employees also got a peek at Office 14's versatility during the company's recent annual employee meeting.
This job opening for the "Office Web Companions team" offers a bit more on what was shown.
"Featured at the 2008 Company Meeting, the Web Companions organization is at the center of Office's Software plus Services transformation, coordinating this key vision area for Office '14'," Microsoft said in a job listing for a lead software development engineer. "Working together with partners across Office and beyond, we are tasked with delivering best-in-class Office Web Applications that expand the reach of the traditional client apps in a wide variety of innovative ways, delivering server, service, and browser client features."
It's not clear how deep the Office 14 discussion will be at PDC. Only two sessions are currently listed with the Office tag, and neither sounds particularly likely to cover new ground. One is on Office business applications, and the other deals with the software's Open XML file formats.
A Microsoft representative declined to offer details on Office 14 or what the company plans to show at PDC.
With less than two weeks until Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference kicks off in Los Angeles, news is starting to trickle out.
Come October 27, that trickle will turn into a flood. Here at CNET News we want to make sure you keep your head above water. To that end, our PDC page is already up and running.
(Credit:
Microsoft)
You can bookmark that page and be sure that whenever you check it you will be up on the latest PDC-related info as well as catch any stories on the products expected to make headlines at the show.
Already there are a ton of posts up, including our scoop on the Surface developer kit, the latest on Windows 7 along with what little we know about Windows Cloud, or Windows Strata, or whatever Microsoft's "Cloud OS" will eventually come to be known as.
Once the show gets under way, check back for in-depth keynote coverage, executive interviews, photo galleries, videos, and more.
In the meantime, feel free to drop me a note on what you want to see covered. I'll also be answering questions on Friday as part of CNET's Editor's Office Hours feature.
A screenshot of Microsoft's PDC Web site, which appears to confirm the Windows Strata name.
(Credit: CNET News)Last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked about "Windows Cloud"--the company's long-rumored cloud operating system.
At the time, though, he noted that the Windows Cloud name was not necessarily the final name. On Wednesday, an eagle-eyed blogger noticed that the Web site for Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference was listing several cloud computing sessions under the subject heading "Windows Strata." Microsoft has since taken down the Windows Strata references, but not before a number of blogs noted the listing.
In his talks last week, Ballmer quipped that by the PDC, Microsoft might even have a trademark for whatever it was going to call the cloud operating system, which he dubbed "Windows Cloud."
"We'll need a new operating system," Ballmer said in France. "Just as we have an operating system for the PC, for the phone, and for the server, we need a new operating system that runs in the Internet. I bet we'll call it Windows something. We're going to announce it in four weeks. We might even have a trademark by then."
I checked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Web site Wednesday morning and didn't see anything under the heading "Windows Strata," but that could be just a matter of time. Microsoft might also want to have a chat with these folks.
In any case, Microsoft is expected to detail the new Internet-based developer platform, as well as Windows 7, at PDC, which starts October 27 in Los Angeles.
A Microsoft representative said, via e-mail: "As you know, Microsoft uses internal code names for pending technologies and from time to time they make their way to the public. We're looking forward to talking more about our cloud services platform at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles."
It's not the first time that Microsoft has elected to break news via its PDC session listings. On Monday, I noted that Microsoft had confirmed in one of its listings that it would be making available to PDC attendees a software development kit for its Surface tabletop computer.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Thursday promised it won't be long before the world gets to meet what he is calling "Windows Cloud"--something that acts like Windows but operates over the Internet.
"Just as we have an operating system for the PC, for the phone, and for the server, we need a new operating system that runs in the Internet," Ballmer said Thursday in a speech before France's CIGREF (Club Informatique des Grandes Entreprises Françaises). "I bet we'll call it Windows something. We're going to announce it in four weeks. We might even have a trademark by then. So, for today I'll call it Windows Cloud. And Windows Cloud will be a place where you can run arbitrary applications up in the Internet that runs .NET."
CEO Steve Ballmer
(Credit: Microsoft )Ballmer first mentioned the "Windows Cloud" name in a speech in London earlier this week. Microsoft is expected to unveil "Windows Cloud" (whether it bears that name or not) at its Professional Developers Conference, which takes place the last week of October in Los Angeles.
Microsoft has already unveiled its Live Mesh, a consumer-based service that synchronizes data across multiple devices. The software maker has promised that application developers will also be able to write Mesh-based applications and that the tools to do so will be detailed at the PDC. Windows Cloud appears to go significantly beyond that, however.
The move into cloud computing, Ballmer said, will require a shift in Microsoft's overall developer tools, Ballmer said on Friday. "Part of that means putting .Net in the browser, which we've done with our Silverlight technology," Ballmer said, according to a transcript posted on Microsoft's Web site. "And yet I don't think the whole world lives in a browser. PC applications have better user interface, and you can integrate them more. Browser applications run on non-Windows machines, and they're easier to manage. We need to bring the benefits of both of those things together on Windows, and through our Silverlight technology permit the targeting of other systems."
Ballmer also talked about desktop Windows at the event, first addressing Vista and then talking briefly about its successor, Windows 7.
"Windows Vista is a product where we made some very conscious choices for some very good reasons that have been very painful," Ballmer said. However, he said that the company has now shipped about 180 million copies of the operating system.
"Deployments in large corporations are now ramping up quite nicely across the world, but in the enterprise I would say we are still earlier."
He then promised that Windows 7, as the company has been saying, will be compatible with Vista.
"No more breaks," Ballmer said. "So, any work we're doing together with you or you're doing on your own to test your applications for Vista compatibility will also apply to Windows 7. We hope you choose to deploy with Vista, but all of that work is good, important work for the long term."
Microsoft plans to release a pre-beta version of Windows 7 to developers attending the PDC.
He also said that Vista has lived up to its target of being, statistically speaking, the most secure version of Windows to date.
Ballmer also talked about the shifting expectations people have for software, pointing to the MySpace generation as one that expects people to have social capabilities built-in to their software.
"The young people you hire today, they grow up on MySpace, Facebook, and instant messaging," Ballmer said. "They grow up with a fundamental notion that applications have knowledge of other people. In order for business applications to go that direction, we need to provide fundamental platform operating system services that really provide what I might call the social web or the social graph."
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a crowd in London that Microsoft this month will show off its new development environment for Internet-based applications--what he dubbed "Windows Cloud."
Steve Ballmer
Although the term--which may or may not be the product's actual name--is new, Microsoft has been widely expected to unveil its cloud-based developer platform at the Professional Developer Conference at the end of October. Ballmer's comments, reported on Wednesday by IDG News Service, are the latest in a series of mentions of a cloud-based developer platform. Ballmer was asked at last week's Churchill Club speech about Red Dog, the company's rumored answer to Amazon's EC2 service.
Ballmer declined to comment about "Red Dog," but promised Microsoft would have much more to say at the company's PDC. Ballmer also said Red Dog and other cloud computing efforts are key to winning the battle for developers, particularly Web developers.
"I think at the end of the day, cloud computing will be dictated by the interests and the degree to which you capture the imagination of developers," Ballmer said.
Microsoft unveiled its Live Mesh effort earlier this year for consumers, but promised that developers would be able to write their own Mesh-enabled applications, with tools coming at the October PDC. Microsoft executives have recently suggested an even broader look at Microsoft's cloud-based strategy will come at the event.
In his London speech, Ballmer also reportedly said Microsoft will soon allow "light editing" of Office documents over the Web, again according to the IDG report.
"That's all I can say on that," Ballmer was quoted as saying. "Otherwise, we have no drum-roll announcement in a month."
Microsoft's Office Live Workspace currently allows for online storage and viewing of documents, but not the editing offered by Google Docs and other online services.
A Microsoft representative was not immediately able to confirm, or comment on, Ballmer's remarks.
Update: They did issue the following statement:
As we've discussed publicly, Microsoft is investing heavily in its Software (plus) Services vision, particularly as it relates to the services platform to deliver a set of solutions that address our customer's needs. In addition to our current, widely adopted service-based technologies, such as Microsoft Online Services and Office Live Workspaces, we are working with many of our customers, partners and our broad developer community to understand their needs for extensible, scalable services platforms. We have publicly discussed a road map of commitments for our services strategy, most notably from Ray Ozzie at MIX 08 and the Financial Analyst Meeting. We are excited to talk more about our progress and opportunities for customers and partners at the Professional Developers Conference in a few weeks, but we don't have any further details to share at this time.
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