Microsoft's cloud strategy?

Monday, October 27, 2008 by Dave Winer.

No one seems to hit the sweet spot, the no-brainer cloud platform that could take our software as-is, and just run it -- and run by a company that stands a chance of surviving the coming recession (which everyone really thinks may be a depression).  

Of all the offerings Amazon comes the closest. With a number of turns of the key you get a Unix or Windows platform in the sky. I wish the number of turns was 1, but it seems to be more like 10 or 20. But it's still pretty good. 

There are a number of VPS companies, but... none of them are really big enough to make a convincing case they won't go the way of Exodus or Conxion, two colo companies I bet on in the past whose pain became my pain when their businesses got in trouble. 

I was hoping Microsoft would hit the home run, but it seems not. Why wouldn't the Windows company just offer Windows in the cloud -- nothing more and nothing less? The marketing people seem to have figured it out, they call the new offering Windows Azure, but what does it have to do with Windows other than sharing a brand? I don't know.  

Wouldn't it have been great if they bought VMWare, or another virtualization vendor, and used their deep financial pockets to create server farms all around the globe that just ran the operating system they made famous? 

Looks like I'm going to bet on Amazon.  

As Rachel Maddow says -- talk me down!