Oct 04 2008
Ballmer announces cloud computing Windows Vapor
(Paris, France) In a speech Thursday at Club Informatique des Grandes Entreprises Françaises, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Microsoft’s plan to enter into the cloud computing fray. “Just as we have an operating system that crashes on the PC, on the phone, and on the server, we need a new operating system that will also crash on the Internet,” Mr. Ballmer said during the speech.
Ballmer added, “I bet we’ll call it Windows something. We are clever that way, you know. We’re going to announce it in four weeks, but who knows when we’ll actually release it. For now we’re calling it Windows Vapor. We were tempted to call it simply Windows Cloud, but given our track record of missing release dates, we figured we would have a little fun and call it Windows Vapor. You get it, as in vaporware. But seriously there is a scientific reason we picked Windows Vapor. You see clouds are mostly composed of water vapor, which forms small droplets of ice crystals. When surrounded by billions of other droplets or crystals they become visible as clouds. So you see in a very scientific way, vapor is the main component of clouds, thus making Windows Vapor, quite appropriate.
“Windows Vapor will be a place where you can run arbitrary applications up in the Internet, well not arbitrary, they’ll have to be .NET applications. So we need to remake our development platform. We’re tentatively calling the next version of our award winning development platform Visual Studio Vapor, which should be available some time in the future.”
Photo Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons: Swamibu
Microsoft seems to be playing catch up for a change. In the cloud computing firms like Zoho, Thinkfree, and eDeskOnline allow us to do all what Microsoft has announced or is planning to do. The start ups are more aggresive, and Microsoft may well lose the race.