At the 2008 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect who replaced Bill Gates, said that the software industry was in the early days of a transformation to services. Microsoft, among others, is embracing a new way of delivering software to end users thanks to increased bandwidth availability over the web.

Windows Azure is a cloud services platform that can be used to build scalable web applications that run from the cloud, i.e. that are hosted in Microsoft data centers and run through the web. Windows Azure enables developers already familiar with Microsoft’s web technologies and development environment, including the .NET framework and Visual Studio, to leverage their existing skills to build web applications. Microsoft’s open platform supports standard protocols and markup languages, such as SOAP, REST, HTML and XML, and will also support third party tools and languages, such as Eclipse, Ruby on Rails, PHP and Python. For a more technical introduction to Windows Azure you may find more information on MSDN’s Channel 9.

Microsoft followed up its Windows Azure unveiling to announce that it will be releasing lightweight versions of its Office applications accessible from a browser. Slashdot points out that, unlike Google Docs, Office web applications will not be free.