Ballmer's Head in the Cloud
You can tell how serious Microsoft is about an area by how many speeches it gives. Steve Ballmer may not (he well may) give more speeches that all other Redmond execs put together, but his clearly gets the most notice.
So the fact that Mr. Ballmer keeps talking publicly about being "all in the cloud" means that Microsoft is plumb serious.
On a tour of Scandinavia (yeah, I'm plumb jealous), Ballmer (of course) touted Azure and gave out some news:
Windows Intune will ship next year. This is a cloud-based security and management tool, which, to my mind, is a lot like what Shavlik is doing by offering its software as a service.
Ballmer also argued that cloud computing does not equal thin client computing. Users still want a rich experience on their own intelligent devices, whether processing happens in the cloud or not. Agree or disagree at [email protected].
By the way, I continue to lunch with cloud and virtualization vendors, many of whom see Azure as a killer cloud platform. As always, I trust my Redmond Report readers' opinions the most. What are your thoughts? Send 'em my way at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 10/06/2010 at 1:18 PM