I’m really enjoying Mary Jo Foley’s series of posts on Red Dog (aka Windows Azure) and even though I’ve worked closely with this team, I’ve learned a fair bit from the last two posts.

Part 1: Permanent Link to Red Dog- Can you teach old Windows hounds new tricks-

Part 2: How the Red Dog dream team built a cloud OS from scratch

Part 3 has just arrived and it’s the one I’m most interested in as Mary Jo digs in to what David Cutler has been up to with a rare Q&A.

For anyone who has followed Microsoft for anytime, you’ll likely know of the legendary Cutler. If not, I strongly urge you to track down a copy of Showstopper. I agree with Mary Jo who said in her book, Microsoft 2.0, this is probably the best book about Microsoft you can read. It’s so good, I just dug it out of my book case to read again….it’s where the title of this post comes from :)

[update]

Having read the Q&A I enjoyed DaveC’s answer to the last question but most of all his own question which he answered

Cutler: One of the things you did not ask is why aren’t we saying more about Azure and in the process filling the marketplace with sterling promises for the future. The answer to this is simply that the RD group is very conservative and we are not anywhere close to being done. We believe that cloud computing will be very important to Microsoft’s future and we certainly don’t want to do anything that would compromise the future of the product. We are hypersensitive about losing people’s data. We are hypersensitive about the OS or hypervisor crashing and having properties experience service outages. So we are taking each step slowly and attempting to have features 100% operational and solidly debugged before talking about them. The opposite is what Microsoft has been criticized for in the past and the RD dogs hopefully have learned a new trick

The soul of a new Microsoft is in there.