Microsoft and Ray Ozzie cracked the door half open this morning on Windows Azure, the infrastructure formerly known as Windows Cloud. In the process, Ozzie served notice that IT will remain in the Windows/Office grip but with an abstraction layer that blurs the on-premise and on-demand worlds.
The outlines of Live Mesh’s role as arbiter of this abstraction were there to be inferred, but the details of how the Azure service bus arbitrates things like federated identity, workflow services, and overall services management will be left to Tuesday’s keynote. But the leisure with which Ozzie and his lieutenants roll out the announcements belies the speed with which Microsoft is executing this corner turn.
