The Industry Standard - Microsoft will release a competitor to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud by end of 2008 - Comments

This one is looking good.

David Kuan — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:37:16 -0400

This one is looking good. Announcement made at Microsoft PDC today, Windows Azure (the cloud computing platform)

On-demand instances criteria met (see http://www.microsoft.com/azure/solutions.mspx)
Pay as you go criteria met (see http://www.microsoft.com/azure/business.mspx)

Alright already! We are

steveballmer — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:17:44 -0400

Alright already! We are calling it Congo!

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

1 week to go before PDC

David Kuan — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:51:46 -0400

1 week to go before PDC unveiling ... trickles on information are showing ...

An official posting of MS event relating to Microsoft Cloud ... http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=10323...

6 patent filings from Microsoft relating to cloud:

CLOUD-BASED ACCESS CONTROL LIST

RIGHTS MANAGEMENT IN A CLOUD

COMMUNICATION LINK GENERATION IN A CLOUD

RESILIENT COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN CLIENTS COMPRISING A CLOUD

RICH INDEX TO CLOUD-BASED RESOURCES

HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE FOR CLOUD SERVICES

The last patent filing describes "... provides systems and/or methods that facilitate dynamically allocating resources (e.g., hardware, software, . . . ) supported by a third party service provider. The third party service provider can support any number of services that can be concurrently requested by several clients without user perception of degraded computing performance as compared to conventional systems/techniques due to improved connectivity and mitigated latencies. " which is consistent with judgment criteria.

Sorry, not

steveballmer — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:03:01 -0400

Sorry, not true!

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

Two words .... Windows

David Kuan — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 01:30:01 -0400

Two words .... Windows Strata!

@Garrick, right on!

David Kuan — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:50:47 -0400

@Garrick, right on! Expectation is official announcement made at the Professional Developers Conference Oct 27-30 as alluded to by Ballmer.

This seems likely given the

Garrick Hileman932530 — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:04:21 -0400

This seems likely given the news:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/10/amazons_cloud_n.php

Microsoft will release a competitor to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud by end of 2008

Bradley Baker — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:42:18 -0400

Judgment on Oct. 27, 2008: This prediction came true today. Judged at 100%. -- The Industry Standard

Original prediction: When asked at MIX about Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Steve Ballmer indicated that Microsoft would be offering similar services. He refused to further elaborate.

Will Microsoft announce a competitor to EC2 by the end of 2008? For successful closure of this prediction, the Microsoft announcement must offer flexible computing capability with a pay-for-what-you-use pricing scheme.

Ed. note: to clarify, MSFT's new service must be: "able to create, launch and terminate server instances on demand" per the official language on Amazon's site. "Instances" here is Amazon's word for a virtual machine.