Three years to the day from his corner-turn memo about changing Microsoft's direction from software to software plus services and after two days of keynotes, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie reviewed the launch of the Windows Azure cloud OS and forthcoming online versions of the Office suite. Ozzie: It's fun that it's all coming together. It was Mary Jo [Foley] yesterday who pointed out that today is three years to the day that I wrote that initial Services memo - the disruptions thing. Gillmor: The San Francisco thing... Ozzie: Right, what a disaster that was... When there's no Internet access when we're trying to show how the company's going live... Gillmor: Obviously, it's a bit of jujitsu to get to the Web with Office. Ozzie: The the way that they've done it.. a few years ago when they were in the planning phase of this next wave, it was basically, what approach should we take? Should we race to the finish line and have something that was complementary with the base Office or should we do it in a way that guarantees compatibility so that we could implement things and have the same back end so that the same file formats would be ... it would have their full richness and so on? And that's the route they went and I think for the customer it' going to end up being the right route. If you happen to be at a kiosk or wherever, you can use the document where it happens to be stored,and people who are using the PCs will not have any clue that you used whatever - it will just work.

• Cloud Computing and Windows Azure
• Ray Ozzie, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs & The Cloud