Clear as mud
The advance highlight of the technology week was Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, at which we had been told a new operating system designed for cloud computing would be unveiled.
In the end, even though Microsoft delivered on its promise and unveiled Azure, it was a bit of an anticlimax because even after the interminable presentation nobody really knew what the hell it was.
Here are some of the questions we emailed to Microsoft after the launch:
- Is it an OS, or a programming language or what?
- What's it for?
- Who will use it?
- Why do we need it?
- Why should we care?
- What does it compete with?
- What are the commercial implications - does Microsoft make any money from it?
Microsoft has promised to help us with these questions and we hope to bring you the results of that chat shortly. In the end we left coverage of the PDC to our more learned colleague Parm Mann who reported on Azure, as well as the evolution of Live Mesh and Windows 7.
There was one bit of Microsoft news we could get our head around. Microsoft proudly announced that due to the success of service pack one (SP1) for Vista, it wasting no time in rushing out SP2, sharpish.
Let's have a look at the logic of that: what they're effectively saying is that our last fix was so good that we've decided to come out with another fix as soon as possible. Perhaps if this one goes well, they'll scrap the whole thing and start again to celebrate. Hold on, that's what Windows 7 is, isn't it?