Not sure how many remember the UAE from years ago. That was sorta succeeded by BSOD. Now that Redmond has announced their Azure environment, I suspect BSOD will now be succeeded by Azure Screen Of Death – ASOD – well, you read it here first!

I have been using the Amazon EC2 environment to deploy servers and it has been fun. The overall speed and reliability and above all, security and stability, is clearly what we must have in any form of cloud infrastructure. While I would like to give MS a break and let them prove that they can do a decent (am not even asking for good) job at building a cloud infrastructure, I shall wait until they actually roll it out before saying anything. No point commenting on yet another MS vapourware anyway.

Not sure if I should be flattered or worried if someone uses my name when it comes to how he can stop being anonymous. In Oliver’s post he mentions how MS is now interoperable with OpenID so that when he want to comment on my blog, he does not have to be anonymous.

In that post, he talks about “recent decision to accept an invitation to get involved in the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol Working Group.” I don’t think anyone at AMQP invited MS, but rather customer pressure forced MS to consider signing up. The MS official press release says “AMQP Working Group members embraced the news of Microsoft’s decision to join.” I am sure the AMQP group would have been just fine without MS. Key thing to note about MS’s participation in the AMQP group is noted in the last paragraph which I quote here:

Legal Note
Because this will be of concern to many people—particularly in the open
source community—it is worth pointing out one of the legal ramifications
of Microsoft joining AMQP. There is a strong IP provision in the contract
for joining the AMQP working group. Anyone joining the AMQP working
group must freely license IP that is used by AMQP—AMQP is and will always
be an open standard that is free to implement. By joining the AMQP working
group, Microsoft has signed this contract. So, there is no threat of Microsoft
holding the AMQP standard hostage via patent threats

I hope the MS led by Ozzie will turn MS into a “no more doing evil” company. It will be years before we will really know if that is indeed the case. It is always good to hope.