Office 2010 Red Dog Yet another unannounced Micro

Within the Chief Software program Architect Ray Ozzie regime of “announce no service before it;s done,” there have been precious few cloud-computing announcements from Microsoft.That doesn;t mean Microsoft is sitting on its software program laurels, just waiting for the clouds to pass, however. There are a bunch of still-unannounced Microsoft services in the works from business units all over the company.One of these, which the LiveSide.Net guys described as a “cloud utility platform,” is code-named “Red Dog.” According to the LiveSiders,Office 2010, Red Dog, or RD for short, is a project coming out of Amitabh Srivasta;s Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) team — one of the four main Microsoft groups charged with hosting, developing and maintaining the various services Redmond churns out.Unlike other services Microsoft has announced so far, RD is built on a “virtualized computational substrate,” according to a help-wanted description cited by the LiveSiders. RD will be “one of the lowest levels of the services software program hardware/stack,” the job posting said.The LiveSiders posit that RD might be what Microsoft has up its sleeve to compete with Google App Engine. I am not as sure. I believe Microsoft is working on a hosted app platform for developers, with BizTalk Services and SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) at its heart. In fact, I‘ve heard the codename “Zurich” attached to this Google-App-Engine competitor. But are Red Dog and Zurich one and the same? I think they are different, and all part of the big Microsoft services plan within the sky.