Microsoft Touts Its Cloud, Mobile Strategy

Microsoft executives detailed the company’s plans in today’s high impact emerging technologies, mobile and cloud computing. Stuart Johnson reports.

Although Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer emphasized the pending release of Windows Phone 7 during his opening keynote speech at the company’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) Thursday, much of the focus at this year’s event is on moving computing to the cloud.

In fact, he said that, not only is the company “all in” on the cloud, it is also “all in” — just as committed — to succeeding with Windows Phone 7.

Most of the announcements at Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) premier developer event, regarded products and improvements aimed at convincing developers to move their applications to the company’s cloud computing platform, Microsoft Azure.

At the event, officials gave a status update on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing service. In June the company boasted it had already signed up 10,000 paying customers for Microsoft Azure — after just four months of billings. Now, a little more than four months beyond that, paid customers have doubled to 20,000.

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