In talking to Microsoft's Steven Martin about cloud computing, he said something that suggested how much the world has changed. Amazon runs Windows in its EC2 cloud, and Martin says, "We're rooting for them. We want them to be successful [at running Windows]." And that tells me something about the nature of Azure, Microsoft's future cloud.Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud is a place you send your applications to in order to run them. Microsoft's Azure cloud is a place you go to in order to build your applications. In the process, you are very likely to use Visual Studio, the .Net Framework, SQL Server in the form of Azure SQL Services, and Microsoft SharePoint, then run the resulting cloud application in Azure itself.

So is Azure just a super sales site for Microsoft products? No, no more so than Google's AppEngine is a sales site for PHP tools, even though you will write your application in PHP if you want to take advantage of the AppEngine.

We are in the early stage of cloud computing where various vendors are creating environments in which you may run your workload as a guest -- a paying guest, as in a boarding house, to be sure, but nevertheless, a guest. With Microsoft, it will be the guest's responsibility to assemble the workload in the Azure environment, using an Azure software development kit to see how to connect to existing Azure services or build new ones.

SharePoint, for example, will be an application that runs in Azure, but a smart guest there will know how to discern which SharePoint services he wants, and attach only those services to his new Web application. Such a move could avoid the unnecessary cost and overhead that might follow making a full-bore deployment of SharePoint in his company environment.

Customer relationship management services will be another early offering in the Azure cloud. You could either build a new application in Azure, or attach CRM services there to your existing applications in your own environment. Ditto for directory and identity management services.

There's no precise time frame for all this to be available but you can be sure Microsoft doesn't want the cloud computing phenomenon to get any further ahead of it than it already has. In the end, Azure will do for Windows users what Microsoft has tried to do elsewhere: make a lot of computing power available in a highly accessible, affordable way.

If it works out the way Martin expects, an insurance company with a risk evaluation application running against actuarial tables every three months will move that workload into the cloud. Instead of keeping a lot of spare capacity on hand in the data center, the spike of activity that the application represents will disappear as a capital cost and become a more reasonable cloud expense.

For that to happen, much, much more will need to be done to make computing in the cloud possible. But Martin says Microsoft can be counted on to "take the hard problems and make them simpler to solve, the tools easier to use and the services easier to consume."