Aos gritos de frases como "I love you partners!," o sempre bem-humorado CEO da Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, entrou no palco do Minneapolis Convention Center, em Minnesota (EUA), para encerrar a edição deste ano da Worldwide Partner Conference. E cravou: os próximos dez anos terão mais inovações do que os últimos dez. "O lançamento do Office 12 e do Longhorn deve agitar os negócios daqui para a frente. E a Microsoft acertou ao ouvir as sugestões dos parceiros e flexibilizar o modelo de licenças, principalmente para os pequenos," disse Jorge Sukarie, presidente da Brasoftware.

Since Microsoft's forecast - and its margin implications - is nothing to sneeze at, we asked industry analyst and cloud spotter Amy Wohl what she has been seeing. 'The first thing to keep in mind is that we have some semantic confusion, as is usual at this stage of a new market, around just what is a cloud. We are now pretty sure that what we used to call grids and what we now call clouds is the same thing. But we also have things called 'platforms' that seem to be very much like a kind of cloud (and are sometimes called clouds) and then there is SaaS itself which looks very much like a cloud with some application software.