IMHO, MS has indeed been leading in cloud computing for 15 years. I offer as evidence their primary tool: Microsoft Updates. With the exception of a few hiccups, this service has been flawless. There are those that argue that if there weren't so many security holes, we wouldn't need updates. This is true. But the fact is Updates has been their back office backbone since Win95. And I personally trust it to work flawlessly every time. And so do millions of others.
This concept of a public "cloud" is marketing gobbledygook. MS needs to get away from the Live concept of a landing page with pictures and contacts and chat and god knows what else they try to suck in for the general public. Facebook cornered social. Period. And they don't have all this special customization of the landing page. If people wanted that, they would have stayed with MySpace. Everyone knows that MS is primarily business focused. Ballmer needs to bite the bullet and stop trying to be everything for everybody. Develop different markets, sure, but stop trying to tie it all together. That's what the name does now: "Microsoft". The public already knows who you are. The cloud will always exist.
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