Microsoft has announced a version of Windows that runs over the internet from inside Microsoft's own datacentres.
Ray Ozzie delivers his keynote address at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference. (Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)
Dubbed Windows Azure, it's less a replacement for the operating system that runs on one's own PC than it is an alternative for developers, intended to let them write programs that live inside Microsoft's data centers as opposed to on the servers of a given a business.
"It's a transformation of our software and a transformation of our strategy," said Ray Ozzie, a computing industry pioneer who now serves as Microsoft's chief software architect.
Microsoft first outlined a shift to "Live Services" at an event in San Francisco in 2005. The company has released a few things piecemeal, such as Live Mesh, but Monday's announcement marked the first real discussion of how Microsoft's disparate Internet strategies fit together.
The announcements come at the start of Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference. On Tuesday, Microsoft plans to go into more detail on Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista, due out by about January 2010.
With the launch of Azure, Microsoft will find itself in competition with other providers of Internet storage and computing services including Amazon, Salesforce.com, and Rackspace.
Microsoft said that it is making Windows Azure in preview form to developers, with a limited subset of the features that it plans to have in the product before its final release.
There weren't many details on how Microsoft will charge for Azure, saying it will be free during the preview period. Final pricing, Ozzie said, "will be competitive with the marketplace."
The company itself plans to offer businesses the option of running over the Internet the kinds of software that have traditionally run on a company's own servers. Microsoft already sells its Exchange corporate e-mail software in this way, but that is just the beginning, said Microsoft vice president Dave Thompson.
"All our enterprise software will be delivered as an online service as an option," Thompson said.
CNET News' Elinor Mills contributed to this report.
In typical web-based media/blogging style Elinor Mills gets the whole Azure system outright WRONG, showing a complete lack of understanding of what real programming is about.
Azure is not an operating system - its a programming ecosystem for programmers to extend their programs out to the internet.
Azure is nothing to do with Rackspace, salesforce.com and only remotely related to certain backend services offered by Amazon.
Users (either enterprise or consumer) will basically be none the wiser about Azure.
Azure is not "for" consumers or Windows users. These people will use applications as they do today... and I'm sure they will not even know those applications are being provided via Azure backend systems.
PLEASE ZDNet... for once, get someone that knows what they're talking about, programmes for a living, etc to report on these PROGRAMMING conferences.