White sky thinking
Cloud computing is one of the most prominent buzzwords in today's IT industry, but not many people are entirely sure what it means.
Put very simply, it's about accessing computing services from remote servers as opposed to local installations, but there's a lot more to it than that.
One broadly held assumption is that it spells bad news for the biggest PC software company of all - Microsoft - because it offers the opportunity to bypass Microsoft's dominance of software on the PC and go straight to the cloud. However, as you'd expect, Microsoft isn't about to just sit around waiting for that to happen.
Microsoft has named its cloud computing offering "software plus services" to indicate its belief that there will always be a client installed element to cloud computing. Steve Clayton's official job title is software plus services project lead and he speaks exclusively to HEXUS.channel about cloud computing, Twitter and offers perhaps surprising praise for Apple and Google.
