At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2008 this morning Steve Ballmer talked about Cloud Computing – a lot. If you look at the transcript or the video of his session you’ll see the word cloud appear many many times. He also gives a strong indication of where Microsoft is going with this cloud thing. I’ve not seen Steve talk this openly about this stuff before…

 

“So what is the future? The future is about having a platform in the cloud, just as we have an operating system for the client, for the server, for devices. We will be launching a platform for the Internet cloud that lets you write programs and have them deployed and managed, that does computation and storage, and management, directly out in the Internet. We're not getting rid of servers. We're extending the basic programming model and management model that we know today from Windows and Windows Server to the cloud. Software development approaches will need to change. People will want to write applications that actually span this whole world. And so we're driving .NET, and .NET through Silverlight, and JScript to support rich application development across the cloud, the devices, the servers, and, of course, the PC client.”

 

What I think you’re starting to see here is the next evolution of Microsoft. The services era is underway and we’re in for an exciting ride over the next 6 months as that paragraph above starts to become a reality. I agree with a UK partner I was chatting with here in Houston who said some companies are really ready to come on this journey others are standing on the edge a little – fearing change. This partner, and several others I have spoken with, are really looking at this the right way – massive, massive opportunity lies ahead.