The post on the NDTV Profit news channel site clearly states that according to the sources within Microsoft,the next Operating System will be cloud based. Rajan Anandan, MD of Microsoft India also added that All new products from here on will be offered over the cloud, as well as on-premise. Thats a core strategy that we have adopted now

Here is the extract from the NDTV Profit site

Rajan Anandan, MD of Microsoft India, said, "We believe the cloud is the future and cloud will help accelerate Microsofts revenues and profit growth. With the announcement of Azure on Monday, we have completed our cloud offering, which means anything and everything that MS offers can be delivered over the cloud."

However, Microsoft is many years late to the game and has to play significant catch-up.
Is it indeed too late for the giant or can it redeem itself? If cloud is the new inspiration for MS, what sort of cloud integration will its future products see?

"All new products from here on will be offered over the cloud, as well as on-premise. Thats a core strategy that we have adopted now," said Anandan.

Sources within MS say the next operating system from Microsoft, Windows 8, will be a cloud based OS.

Microsoft is planning to spend $9 billion on cloud based R&D, but given that competitors like Amazon and Google have been providing cloud services for a while now, pinching pockets will not work for Microsoft.

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CLOUD COMPUTING is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like a public utility.

It is a paradigm shift following the shift from mainframe to client-server that preceded it in the early '80s. Details are abstracted from the users who no longer have need of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them. Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet.It is a byproduct and consequence of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet.

The term CLOUD is used as a metaphor for the INTERNET, based on the cloud drawing used in the past to represent the telephone network, and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents. Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online which are accessed from another web service or software like a web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers.