The next Microsoft in the cloud computing era is…

“Amazon is in an interesting pickle. It had an excellent
proprietary offering, AWS, and then along came a cross-compatible
open source offering, Eucalyptus. Suddenly it finds itself
competing against other proprietary offerings and against other
AWS-compatible cloud providers. More interestingly, companies can
now build AWS-compatible local clouds.

“Against this backdrop, Microsoft’s cloud strategy stands out
for appearing so poorly defined. On the face of it, it has little
unity or corporate cohesiveness. Microsoft’s tentacles all seem to
be pursuing different and sometimes contradictory strategies. The
reality is, however, that Microsoft may have one of the most viable
long-term cloud strategies on offer.”

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