Microsoft today announced a new product for Cloud Computing, called Windows Azure, which is going to be a cloud-computing platform, or cloud computing Operating System.

Cloud Computing is a buzzword I vaguely understand, so I looked around for a definition of it.

Firstly, Cloud Computing has nothing to do with Microsoft Flight Simulator.

There were over 150 articles on Cloud Computing on Knol (Google’s answer to Wikipedia).

Sam Johnston of Australian Online Solutions wrote:
“Cloud Computing is the realisation of Internet (’Cloud’) based development and use of computer technology (’Computing’) delivered by an ecosystem of providers.”

The next definition, from Kirill Osipov, seemed to sum it up nicely:
“Growth in adoption of software delivered over the Internet resulted in the situation where people depend on Internet for services that enable everyday activities like document editing, photo sharing, banking and so on. To the users, the computing and storage resources needed to power the service software exist in the “cloud”, that is the users are spared the details of where and how the software actually runs.”

In my previous blog entry I quoted from Dian’s GottaHave blog, and will be doing it again, as she gave an interesting reference to in her Blog “Ultra-Low-Cost, Ultra-Mobile Computers, Part 1“: “..Expectations from some companies are that you’ll do your computing “in the clouds,” relying on free services from Google and a hundred other dot-com companies to give you productivity applications and maintain your data.”

Just for reference, the Wikipedia article on Cloud Computing is here.