The allure of Azure

It’s here! Microsoft have announced their own cloud to compete head on with the market already established by Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com. It’s called Azure and it’s currently in a beta preview phase. Determined to get their product right, Ray Ozzie has said that they’ll be taking baby steps with the unveiling – for instance there’s no real details yet of pricing.

We must assume that it’s competitively priced at the very least, but I have reason to believe Microsoft will look beyond a competitor orientated strategy and penetrate the market through innovating out the platform in a series of focus strategies. Based on what I saw and heard at Future of Web Apps, I believe that this cloud will be the technology at the core of a much grander picture yet to be painted by Microsoft.

Microsoft’s approach to startups and emerging business is to assist and nurture those building themselves through the supply of technology, licences, advice and introductions. They’re less inclined to acquire a startup and instead build out the business, almost in partnership, so that the future brings more customers their way.

There’s more to this platform than Microsoft have unveiled. I’ve tried out Live Mesh which is an impressive syncing online desktop, and I hope that Azure will mean developers can add to this experience. Next week we can expect another announcement that will be directly targeted at startups and hopefully make clearer where Microsoft are going next with B2B online services. From there I hope we’ll be able to see how this might all start to change the end user experience in time to align with Windows 7 and other offerings.