English: Ray Ozzie on the PDC of Microsoft announcing Windows Azure Español: Ray Ozzie en la PDC de Microsft anunciando Windows Azure (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Microsoft's Launch Of The Elastic Compute Cloud

In the never-ending battle of tech superiority, Microsoft is pulling out its big guns in order to compete with Amazon's hugely popular EC2 service.  Known as the Elastic Compute Cloud, this infrastructure service cloud will be able to give a user access to virtual hosting and data storage, on computers running Windows as well as Linux.

This second attempt at a challenge to Amazon's super-service is no surprise.  The June 7th launch will be a means of edging into what should be a huge market as more individuals and corporations begin to store more and more data on cloud computing.  The existing Microsoft Azure cloud, however, has no Linux compatibility, a major limiting factor for those who prefer to run third-party programs.