The impact of Microsoft’s announcement that it was entering the Cloud Computing game wasn’t fully appreciated until I was watching Nightly Business Report on PBS and was taken aback when they did a full segment on “cloud computing.”  That was the moment when I realized that the “cloud” had gone mainstream, and the validation made me feel like Paul Revere after having felt more like Chicken Little during countless meetings with CIO’s and IT managers where I was extolling the virtues of SaaS and “utility computing,” and telling them that if they didn’t adopt radically different service delivery strategies, the pending revolution would make IT organizations go from ineffective to archaic almost overnight…only to be met with the obligatory blank stares, skepticism, and protectionist attitudes.  Well, it’s here, and for that I’m…ambivalent?

There’s no doubt that Microsoft entering the Cloud Computing game gives the philosophy / movement / model instant mainstream credibility.  But I’m conflicted as to whether this is a good thing; on the one hand, I can see that the day is almost here where I don’t have to spend half of a sales cycle educating clients on SaaS, PaaS, or “The Cloud.”  On the other hand, when Microsoft enters a market, Microsoft doesn’t conform to the market – it tries to mold the market in its own image.  SaaS, SOA, and Cloud Computing are too important to be co-opted by the traditional IT vendor paradigm, let alone be “Microsoft-ized.”

It will be interesting to see where all of this leads.  I am not anti-Microsoft by any means, and I have a lot of respect for the brainshare in Redmond.  Unfortunately the company has a fairly lengthy history of grandiose announcements and aggressive ambitions that overshoot either the company’s ability to execute or the market’s willingness to adopt the Microsoft way of doing what it has already adopted elsewhere.  I still use Microsoft Office on Microsoft operating systems because the former is the bedrock of productivity tools, but I have not seen anything from the company that I could get excited about since the announcement of Exchange 2000 back in the day when I managed a 10,000+ seat Exchange 5.5 organization.  That was almost 10 years ago.

The fanfare surrounding Azure has been a boon for everyone involved in the Cloud Computing space – a “rising tide lifts all boats” scenario – but our take is that this project will take Microsoft years to complete, and in the end it will prove to be too grand a proposition for them to get out the door in the timeframe necessary for it to be truly game-changing.  What we will see in the late 2009 / early 2010 timeframe is a limited framework, scaled back significantly from what was evangelized on the initial Azure roadmap, that provides access to small-scale “widget”-like functionality that marginally extends the functionality of only a handful of core products.  By that time, the thought leaders in the utility computing / Cloud Computing space will be pushing far more compelling envelopes, and the ability to run Office through a web browser and write cool widgets for it will elicit a collective yawn from all but the deeply entrenched enterprise CIO-types that can claim adoption of “The Cloud” in the most conservative (i.e. non-pension-threatening) manner possible.  But hey, thanks for the millions of marketing dollars to help educate the mainstream, Microsoft!  We’ll be sure to ride on those coattails for as long as the checkbook remains open.

Gartner: Microsoft’s Cloud Vision Reaches for the Stars but Is Grounded in Reality

Phil Wainewright: Windows Azure: Microsoft mainstreams the cloud

Dave Rosenberg: Microsoft’s Azure–I remain perplexed