It has been 4 months considering that Microsoft took the official wraps off its cloud-computing initiative. But nevertheless reasonably small nevertheless is known about the Azure platform and options.The part of Azure which intrigued me one of the most was the cloud working system,
Microsoft Office 2010, code-named “Red Dog,
Office 2007 Serial,” that is at its heart. Late last month, Microsoft allowed me access to many of the principals behind Red Dog — everyone from the infamous father of VMS and NT, David Cutler, for the handful of top-dog engineers who helped design and develop the various Red Dog core components. Over the course of this week,
Office 2010 Activation, I;m going to be publishing a post a day about Red Dog.Component 1: It;s not just about Windows any moreWhat led Microsoft — which has spent a good part of the past decade-plus protecting the Windows franchise at the expense of the Web — to finally create an infrastructure that would support not just Windows developers, but also Web programmers? And how did a company known for its slipping dates more than making its shipping dates manage to build a cloud-computing platform that developers could begin test-driving in less than two years?Not so long ago,
Windows 7 Ultimate, Microsoft quite possibly would have simply rented out a bunch of Windows Server machines and expected that anyone inside or outside the company interested in making use of them would flock to pay for datacenter power by the hour. The Microsoft of old would have pitted multiple in-house development teams (unbeknown to each of them) against 1 another in designing the various cloud-computing components,
Windows 7 Home Premium, with “the best” team ultimately winning. And the good ol; Soft would have, undoubtedly, counted on having four or five years to get its act together before even thinking about fielding a first cloud OS test build.None of that happened with Red Dog. Even before the finishing touches were done on Windows Vista, CEO Steve Ballmer was talking with Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate Vice President, about his next assignment. At that point, Srivastava, a 12-year Microsoft veteran, was a leader in the Windows team and was in charge of redesigning the engineering processes around how Windows was built.In 2006, “I was thinking about what to do next,” Srivastava said. “Would I work on the next version of Windows?”Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie had joined Microsoft about a year before and “was completely high on services,” Srivastava recalled. “But I didn;t have a services background. Steve (Ballmer) suggested I go talk to Ray.” Hours later, the pair were nonetheless talking.[How to turn a bunch of Windows guys into services guys] –>