That's the statement (or perhaps a question) at the top of Techmeme today thanks to Nick Carr and I'm sat smiling on a Sunday. This is the world I work in today at Microsoft and it's as exciting a time as I can remember. Historically, Microsoft has done some of it's best work when it appears to be in a corner and this is time around is no different- added to which Ray Ozzie is on board and beavering away. All I can say is 2008 is going to be a big year for Software plus Services from Microsoft.

As SteveB said last week in an interview with eWeek

"We will have a Windows software-plus-services cloud platform for people to build applications on and where they can deploy those applications. Maybe someone will do the same thing for Linux, but it probably won’t be us,”

 

Bob Muglia added

 

Amazon’s EC2 “is something we think about all the time. Obviously one of the things we would bring to such a picture is the breadth of our platform. We probably wouldn’t go about a solution like that the way Amazon does because we have a much broader platform to bring to market. I don’t think that just bringing raw compute resources is anywhere near as interesting as the broad platform, but we do think about it a lot,” he said.

The pieces of the puzzle are starting to come in to place and a number of exec interviews over the last few weeks have highlighted some of the pieces.

 

[update] more from Carr - Rumor: Microsoft set for vast data-center push