[photo credit: NY Times]

I enjoyed Bobbie Johnson’s piece in The Guardian yesterday about cloud computing and Microsoft’s lack of strategy here. Well, lack of visible strategy I would say and though Bobbie goes down the Yahoo route to look for answers, that’s a bit of a red herring in my opinion. Sure, Yahoo would be a part of a cloud strategy but I don’t think it’s the natural answer to where Bobbie is looking what we’re doing relative to Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine. For that I’m surprised Bobbie didn’t venture in to looking at Live Mesh which has been big news this last week and holds some of the answers as Jack Schofield noted. I say some, because more of this will come to light at the PDC this year. Live Mesh as a platform is an important part of this story but there are other pieces too.

Take a look at our datacenter rollout. This has gotten more publicity recently and if you think of cloud computing, it’s a good place to look. The FT holds some clues. A $500m investment in a Dublin datacenter and several others of similar size in the US runs contrary to lack of investment Bobbie talks of.

What is different here though (and Bobbie has the clue in his piece) is the propaganda war. Lets call it “the Ozzie factor”.

In the past, Microsoft would have gotten out in front of this stuff much more and talked about our plans with excitement and chest beating. I think we’ve learnt from that approach and seem to err more on the side of talking when we have something ready to talk about. It’s very much the Ozzie way. Go to the Wharton interview and search for the word criticism. Then read on. You’ll see what I mean.

Despite this approach, lots of pieces of the cloud jigsaw are out there – in fact I laid out some of the pieces last week. Those with a keen eye beyond the gratuitous Yahoo angle will see that Ray has been doing the same for over 2 years now.

If you’re prepared to do a little more than take a cursory glance, the story is out there.