I’m only going to touch briefly on Microsoft’s cloud computing platform that they’ve revealed at their Professional Developer’s Conference will be called Windows Azure: It sounds too complicated, and to be frank, details are still to sketchy to make any decent report on it yet to my mind:

Having said that; Mary Jo Foley of ZDnet has made an outstanding effort to make something out of the intense mayhem of the Microsoft version of cloud computing, and I suggest that you read her article which can be found here.

The softies are revealing more about Windows 7 today and are releasing the first pre-beta code:

It’s reported to include many new features including a better desktop and user interface, multitouch controls, improved boot-time, USB drive encryption, among other things.

Microsoft admitted in so many words that it had made a mistake with Vista: "The ecosystem wasn’t ready for the release of Windows Vista," said Windows senior vice president, Steve Sinofsky, who then went on to list a small catalogue of Vista-related failings.

Sinofsky cited the decision to change the underlying Windows version number to 6.1 rather than version 7 as a sign of its intention to ease the task of upgrading. (See this article on PCMech.com.) "If it works on Windows Vista, it’ll work in Windows 7. The move from Vista to Windows 7 we expect to be seamless." He said.

It was also indicated that Windows 7 would perform well "…on a netbook with only 1GB RAM.": Does this mean that the system requirements will be less than Vista’s and more like XPs? It appears to hint that this may be so, and if so that is definitely a step in the right direction, away from the bloatware of Vista.

What Microsoft refused to disclose, though, is how many different versions of Windows 7 there’d be, and also the cost of the operating system. (Please don’t have more than 3 or 4 versions: Vista was a joke with all of its many version; only a couple of which were any good!)

Microsoft still refuse to provide details of a final release date for Windows 7. They’re probably being cagey this time round: Last time with Vista, development took a lot longer than originally intended, but to stick to the announced target as much as was possible, to save face, and to satisfy the whining customers; they released too early despite being well behind schedule, and gave us a buggy mess of underdeveloped faulty codebase that took everyone by surprise as well as losing a lot of their existing customer base. I don’t think they want to make such a massive balls-up this time around.

What do you think? Are they just being more careful, or could they be having secret development problems?

Addendum

See the BBC’s news coverage of the cloud-computing race.Click here.

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