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It doesn’t matter that Microsoft didn’t get all that much hype this year at the PDC or that it didn’t sell out or that other companies like Amazon, Google, and Rackspace are ahead in the cloud game. You just saw Ray Ozzie turn the creaky old cruiseliner hard to port and damn, it is impressive

Nick Carr's difficulty in understanding my argument that cloud computing is likely to end up a low-margin business unless companies find some way to harness the network effects that are the heart of Web 2.0 made me realize that I use the term "network effects" somewhat differently, and not in the simplistic way many people understand it.

At Microsoft's PDC (Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie unveiled the company's much-anticipated cloud computing platform, dubbed Windows Azure.

"To the extent the world moves to Web-based software, that's very hard for Microsoft -- it completely unlocks their grip on your desktop,'' said Sarah Friar, a Goldman, Sachs & Co. analyst in San Francisco. "Within Microsoft, people just pooh- pooh that idea. There's a huge complacency within the company.''

Microsoft is offering a new service to allow you to do the same type of data mining in the plugin online. Simply upload your Excel spreadsheet of data and you have all the same functionality online that you did in the plugin.

Amazon announced that it plans to offer developers this fall the ability to run Windows Server or SQL Server via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). According to the Amazon Web Services site, “the ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability.â€

That was a triple whammy directed at Sun. Not only was Oracle endorsing low-cost Intel boxes over Sun's mighty Sparc to power the server farms that run cloud data centers - an area where Sun has been heavily pushing Sparc - but she was also hitting Sun's Sparc Niagara processor family in an area where Sun has been making a lot of noise: power consumption.

The move will give Amazon’s cloud services some serious enterprise heft. In a blog post, Amazon said it will offer EC2 services preloaded with Oracle’s software–Enterprise Linux, Database 11g, Fusion Middleware, Enterprise Manager and developer tools–as well as support options.

The traditional data center won’t disappear overnight, but it will almost certainly shrink on a regular basis from now on

According to Ian Thomas, IT has consistently failed to deliver expected value time and time again. Ian believes that we all need to recognise these trends and learn the lessons of industrialisation from other more mature industries. Elaborating on previous work Ian Thomas discusses requirements for industrialization of software delivery along with the ways of achieving it.