Its not a surprise that everything is now being transferred to the cloud, which will be the core component in the world of Grid Computing. Having services in the cloud makes them accessible no matter where you go. Just hook up to the Internet, and you'll have all your stuff at your finger tips. This was considered a futuristic technology, not too long ago but it has made its way to our desktops earlier than we expected.

A lot of organizations offer "cloud" services, and Microsoft plans to join them soon. At Student Technology Day in London, Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft is working on a new operating system, and no its not Windows 7. "Windows Cloud", the internal name for the operating system will be announced with its official name along with some of its features at Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference in Los Angeles on October 27.

Ballmer says,

...Just like Windows Server looked a lot like Windows, but with new properties, new characteristics and new features, so will Windows Cloud; it’ll look a lot like Windows Server...

He also said that today's environments are not very friendly for developers to write cloud computing applications.

Ballmer stressed that Microsoft believes that the future is Software + Service, indicating that the same service would be available across a range of platforms, including mobile devices. This is a very welcoming move by Microsoft, which would also be introducing its next version of Windows Mobile next year. Putting services in the cloud seems the be the major objective of Microsoft which is evident from the development of Office Live, .NET Framework 4.0, Windows Cloud and Windows Mobile 7. Suddenly now, "Life without walls" is starting to make sense to me.