Microsoft’s long hold on power in the software industry has depended on its solid grip on developers. Programmers have written uncountable desktop and client/server applications over the decades that have inextricably linked independent software developers and corporate IT shops to Microsoft. Now the company aims to do the same for cloud-based software by luring loyal programmers to its Windows Azure environment.

Still in beta, Azure features both proprietary tools that Windows developers will recognize and standard technologies that could appeal to programmers outside of Microsoft’s orbit. Whether that strategy will work remains to be seen, since Microsoft trails Salesforce.com, Amazon.com, Google and others in entering the cloud, which Merrill-Lynch & Co. has estimated will be a $95 billion market by 2011.

Azure’s underlying operating system is a version of Windows Server 2008 that is currently running on virtualized two-core, dual-processor Intel servers. Steven Martin, Microsoft’s director of connected system products management, says that unlike traditional developers, Azure application writers won’t need to take hardware constraints into account when developing software because Azure is designed to scale up or down based on application demands. Moreover, he says, Azure’s .Net Services and SQL Services incorporate characteristics of cloud computing.

Read More @ InfoWorld

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