At a Microsoft event in London, CEO Steve Ballmer said, “We need a new operating system designed for the cloud and we will introduce one in about four weeks, we’ll even have a name to give you by then. But let’s just call it, for the purposes of today, Windows Cloud.”

What is Windows Cloud?

We’ll see it when it gets here, but my guess it is a set of plugins to IE that connect into Live Mesh. In fact it pretty much has to be, because Ballmer also said, “We’re not driving an agenda towards being service providers, but we’ve gotta build a service that is Windows in the cloud.

The idea of Microsoft announcing a product and delivering it in 4 weeks sounds like fiction, but I think Microsoft is responding as quickly as it can to Google and particularly to Google Chrome (if you’re not sure what relevance the Google Chrome browser has, read this and while you’re at it, it may make sense to read this too.) Ballmer seems to agree with me. He’s noticed that Google is building a browser-based OS. He noted, “If you talk to Google they’ll say it’s thin client computing but then they’ll issue a new browser that’s basically a big fat operating system designed to compete with Windows but running on top of it.” (Actually Firefox is a big fat operating system too.)

It’s 4 weeks until Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, so that’s probably when “Windows Cloud” will be announced with a real product name.

Ballmer is absolutely right that Microsoft has to find a life for Windows in the cloud. So far its Internet initiatives have fizzled, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t invested money and time and built some impressive assets - and by the way, about 6 months ago, Microsoft announced Live Mesh. If you have no idea what Live Mesh is, take a look at the diagram below, which illustrates what lies beneath.

pd044livemesh.gif

You might be impressed by this - in fact you should be - and I’m not just talking about the pretty cloud graphics that permeate each of the layers shown in the illustration. This is what Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie has been working on for quite a while now and if you marry it to a browser you really do have an OS in the cloud. In any event it makes sense to me:

  • Infrastructure Services: The management of the cloud
  • A Services Platform: Providing data services and connectivity services - but particularly looking after data synchronization.
  • A Developer Stack: Well, of course.
  • Live Mesh Experiences: Marketing speak for plug-ins and apps.
  • Developer Tools: Able to thread things together

All of this needs to manifest on the desktop and having it manifest through a browser is  the only option. But it wont really be a browser, it will be more of a managed gateway to the cloud - which is what Google Chrome looks like to me.

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