Two weeks ago I attended Microsoft’s Platform Strategic Review. Its an intensive 2 day session where the key architects of Microsoft present their short and long term plans at a platform level to an invited audience under strict NDA. There were several highlights but for me the most important realisation was the sheer scope of Azure. Cloud computing is much in the press and as Microsoft points out, there are probably as many definitions as there are implementations. Perhaps more. Microsoft defines cloud computing by example rather than in words. That seems to me to be smart since it allows them latitude in just how far the Azure umbrella stretches.

Azure is a massive undertaking that Microsoft is betting heavily on. It is my considered opinion that cloud computing is the single most important factor in software this year. And I think Microsoft’s bid for ascendency in this space is likely to overwhelm many of the lesser players. NDA rules prevent disclosure here of the scope but its massive.

Azure’s integration with Microsoft’s platforms is impressive but as yet incomplete. Hyper-V would I think be a fairly obvious integration platform as would Windows 7 itself. As always, Visual Studio is efficiently and elegantly integrated.

Speaking of Hyper-V, there was a demo that I thought was really impressive. So imagine a video running in a loop from a virtual machine. Now from the control console of Hyper-V, we move that VM from one machine in our cluster to another (not copy). And the video is perfectly smooth through that move. Imagine being able to deliver applications to a customer this way !