Amazon Web Services has established itself as a leader in the cloud computing market, and Microsoft has been playing catch-up. However, as Microsoft's Azure cloud strategy falls into place, it's sounding more like these would-be partners are on a collision path.Microsoft and Amazon aren't talking like competitors; in fact, the opposite is true. When InformationWeek's Charles Babcock talked to Steven Martin, Microsoft's senior director of developer platform product management, earlier this week, Martin had this to say about Amazon offering Windows Server as a cloud service: "We're rooting for them. We want them to be successful."

And one scenario, as described by Charlie, is that Windows developers will write applications in Microsoft's Azure environment, then move them over for hosting on AWS. That would be a best-of-both-worlds approach, a model of applications portability, user flexibility, and vendor cooperation.

But there's another scenario, and one that I think is equally, if not more, likely. In this scenario, Microsoft increasingly offers infrastructure as a service -- Windows, SQL Server, middleware, and other data center resources -- as flexible, pay-as-you-go options. Of course, that's the business that Amazon's already in. Increasingly, the partners find themselves competing for the same customers.

In talking with Microsoft's Martin myself this week, I got the sense that this is entirely plausible. Martin didn't come out and say that Microsoft will compete head-to-head with AWS, but he did say that Microsoft intends to offer a computing layer that provides the building blocks for applications, while hiding the complexities. He mentioned computing, storage, database, bandwidth, and message queuing as examples of the kind of resources that would be offered as Azure services. And he said Microsoft's services would be "consumptive in nature" and "very competitively priced against market equivalents."

Market equivalents? Hmmm, whom could that be?

Indeed, Amazon isn't the only cloud company that Microsoft will eventually compete against. Martin says 6,000 hosting companies use Microsoft technology, so Microsoft will find itself -- as it does in other parts of its business -- competing with some of the same companies that are its customers and partners. There will be "coopetition" in the cloud.

Microsoft will talk more about Azure and its cloud computing strategy at the company's upcoming MIX conference, which runs March 18-20, in Las Vegas. I don't expect Microsoft to say that it plans to compete with Amazon. But that doesn't mean that it won't.