Steve Ballmer spoke at the University of Washington this afternoon on Microsoft and the cloud. He spoke for a little over an hour with some Q&A at the end and included demos of BingMaps (by Blaise of course) Sky Player on XBOX. He touched on almost every aspect of Microsoft’s business and how it’s influenced by the cloud – noting that ~40k people within the company work on cloud and literally stated that we’re betting the company on this trend. I guess the closest thing I have seen to this before at Microsoft was Bill’s infamous Internet Tidal Wave memo. The lineage of today's talk can in many way be traced back to Ray Ozzie’s Internet Services Disruption memo. It’s actually pretty interesting to go back and read that memo and see how the company has religiously pursued the section on opportunities and delivered on the vast majority of them.

Steve’s talk focused on the following 5 dimensions and walked through each with examples.

1. The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities – think Azure enabling a small business to get off the ground with low startup costs or Domino’s scaling their pizza order business on demand. On the responsibilities, it’s about having a business model that doesn’t block putting users in control of their data.
   
   
2. The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action – here Steve was talking about the way Bing is approaching search by working on user intent rather than serving up a set of blue links. Plenty of work to do here but it’s a long game. Steve also talked about Excel and though he didn’t mention it by name, our Dallas cloud service for accessing and easily analysing public data sets in the cloud. This was the point Blaise Aguera y Arcas and did what he does…rockin’ demos.
   
   
3. The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions – Steve talked about email and social networking and again though he didn’t switch in to a product pitch, the Outlook Social Connector is a great example as is the work of Live. Even my thinking was too narrow on this though as the social work we do has extended way beyond those two obvious platforms and in to Zune (Twitter, Facebook, Zune Social) and XBOX which not only have a Twitter and Facebook applications but 20m+ users of XBOX Live and interactive services such as Sky Player. I’ve not had much of a play with Sky Player but will now having seen the demo. If I think even further, we have some terrific partner applications built on Microsoft technologies that are social – Seesmic being a fine example.
   
   
4. The cloud wants smarter devices – Steve alluded to the work we’ll be doing on browsers and standards and went on to talk about the PC, TV and phone. He talked about out TellMe service which will get about 10 billion utterances submitted to us in the cloud. Again, not a cloud service that naturally came to mind for me….I’ll get back to that theme later. He also talked about Natal and the importance of smart devices (i.e. not just a dumb device connected to a cloud). He also took the chance to show off the evolution of PC and held up my PC (not actually mine), the superthin Sony Vaio X. As you’d expect when talking devices, he also mentioned Windows Phone 7 Series which promises to come with a lot of social and a lot of cloud built in from what I have seen.
   
   
5. The cloud drives server advances that drive the cloud -  Steve talked about the impact the cloud is having on how we (and the industry) thinks about servers. The cloud is after all a set of servers and virtualisation is a big part of the cloud. He noted though how virtualisation is just one part of the story when it comes to scale. Taking an existing app and simply dropping it on to a virtualised infrastructure doesn’t necessarily means you now have infinite scale. Designing applications with the cloud in mind is what gets you that and it’s something we think about in our developer tools and our cloud platform in the form of Azure. Steve also took along a containerised “cloud” with him that was parked outside of the facility – nice :)

That was the meat of Steve’s speech and he finished saying “the cloud fuels Microsoft, and Microsoft fuels the cloud” – noting 70% of Microsoft staff are working on the cloud across those 5 dimensions.

My takeaway? I work on this stuff every day and have done for the last 2 years and even I was surprised when I stepped back from the coal face how much Microsoft has going on that is cloud related. Things like TellMe hadn’t occurred to me and XBOX as a cloud service is huge, successful and often overlooked when people say Microsoft is late to the cloud. I suspect many would be happy to be called late if they had a service with 20m+ paying users as XBOX Live has. I’m not aiming to be boastful here…in fact I’m a little embarrassed that it’s taken me until now, a guy who works on the cloud, to realise all of the assets we have and put them together in to a coherent story.

Steve sent an internal email on the gravity of his talk today and as often happens, that’s in the public domain. He urges the company to move at “cloud speed” and I can assure you if my work is anything to go by, that is happening already :)

Okay, I’ll finish there as it’s been a long and interesting day (01:48 here in the UK) but will leave you with this Wordle view of Steve’s speech today (note I removed Steve & Ballmer from the transcript for this). Are we really “All In” in the cloud? Yep, I think so.