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General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)
« on: October 27, 2008, 11:01 PM »
Web based/cloud computing is not just limited to running apps on remote servers. There's nothing preventing an app having a cached local copy of its program, data and services, and using that for performance, and accessing the cloud when its not cached, to update itself etc. In fact .NET contains these mechanisms today. At work we have intranet apps deployed using ClickOnce that run locally, but if there's a new version it gets downloaded and installed locally automatically.
Cloud computing is also the only way I see to have a truly universal presence - i.e having the same computing experience no matter where you are or what device you use to access the cloud (i.e. the internet). Think about email. Today many of us take webmail for granted. I know for sure that without gmail I would never be able to send/receive mail from multiple places and have it all be in sync. Could you do this with a normal desktop email client? Esp without IMAP?
The way I see it, Azure is Microsoft's technology to bring highly scalable distributed apps, the sort of thing Google does (gmail, search, maps) to the Windows audience with a very strong developer base.
Cloud computing is also the only way I see to have a truly universal presence - i.e having the same computing experience no matter where you are or what device you use to access the cloud (i.e. the internet). Think about email. Today many of us take webmail for granted. I know for sure that without gmail I would never be able to send/receive mail from multiple places and have it all be in sync. Could you do this with a normal desktop email client? Esp without IMAP?
The way I see it, Azure is Microsoft's technology to bring highly scalable distributed apps, the sort of thing Google does (gmail, search, maps) to the Windows audience with a very strong developer base.