The ubiquitous presence of the software behemoth in the current computing model makes its actions of interest to any observer. It seems to have enthusiastically embraced the notion of cloud computing, and sees the Azure platformto formthe backbonefor a significantportion of the applications thatwill run on the cloud. Developers of cloud applications can potentiallymix andmatch the building block services (e.g., .NET services, SQL Services, Live Services, etc.) that will run on the base Azure “operating system”. Microsoft intends to offer its own cloud applications (e.g.ExchangeOnline) thatwill run off theAzure platform