Natural Order Development

I love the presentation style for this video on Microsoft's coming technology:

What is Windows Azure?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poDRw_Xi3Aw

Cloud computing is very interesting it promises to provide many benefits such as Software as a Service (SaaS) through utility based computing. In other words you can let someone else deal with the economies of scale problem of hardware and maintenance removing a lot of the overhead in dealing with systems to be taken away, which is a reasonable definition for Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Using cloud-based services from a managed service provider (MSP) enables transparent computing which IT customers can use to meet their needs. There are a lot of benefits to this virtualization infrastructure, especially in reduced costs. It is not inexpensive or easy to hire a systems engineer to assemble and maintain a corporate infrastructure to provide email, web services, and groupware services. The hardware, space, and utility costs for such systems is easily out of reach of many small companies or hobbyists.

The promise of cloud computing is loosely coupled services running on an agile, scalable infrastructure enabling enterprise class services with four or five nine's (99.99% to 99.999%) of up time. Cloud computing has been a long-running trend with a very far-off horizon, but, among technology super-trends, cloud computing is the hardest one to argue with as a viable long term solution.