Submitted by Bradley Baker03.12.2008
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Microsoft will release a competitor to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud by end of 2008
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This prediction is closed and has been judged.
Judgment on Oct. 27, 2008: This prediction came true today. Judged at 100%. -- The Industry Standard
Original prediction: When asked at MIX about Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Steve Ballmer indicated that Microsoft would be offering similar services. He refused to further elaborate.
Will Microsoft announce a competitor to EC2 by the end of 2008? For successful closure of this prediction, the Microsoft announcement must offer flexible computing capability with a pay-for-what-you-use pricing scheme.
Ed. note: to clarify, MSFT's new service must be: "able to create, launch and terminate server instances on demand" per the official language on Amazon's site. "Instances" here is Amazon's word for a virtual machine.
Price History
Prediction Statistics
| Betting Closes: | Dec 30 2008 | Current Consensus: | 86.99% | Total Bets: | 30 |
| Today's Change: | 14.88% | ||||
| Life Time High: | 86.99% | ||||
| Life Time Low: | 45.02% |
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This seems likely given the news:
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/10/amazons_cloud_n.php
@Garrick, right on! Expectation is official announcement made at the Professional Developers Conference Oct 27-30 as alluded to by Ballmer.
Two words .... Windows Strata!
Sorry, not true!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
1 week to go before PDC unveiling ... trickles on information are showing ...
An official posting of MS event relating to Microsoft Cloud ... http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=10323...
6 patent filings from Microsoft relating to cloud:
CLOUD-BASED ACCESS CONTROL LIST
RIGHTS MANAGEMENT IN A CLOUD
COMMUNICATION LINK GENERATION IN A CLOUD
RESILIENT COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN CLIENTS COMPRISING A CLOUD
RICH INDEX TO CLOUD-BASED RESOURCES
HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE FOR CLOUD SERVICES
The last patent filing describes "... provides systems and/or methods that facilitate dynamically allocating resources (e.g., hardware, software, . . . ) supported by a third party service provider. The third party service provider can support any number of services that can be concurrently requested by several clients without user perception of degraded computing performance as compared to conventional systems/techniques due to improved connectivity and mitigated latencies. " which is consistent with judgment criteria.
Alright already! We are calling it Congo!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
This one is looking good. Announcement made at Microsoft PDC today, Windows Azure (the cloud computing platform)
On-demand instances criteria met (see http://www.microsoft.com/azure/solutions.mspx)
Pay as you go criteria met (see http://www.microsoft.com/azure/business.mspx)
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