In a recent article on Bill Thompson’s blog, Closing the Gates after Bill, he made it quite clear that although Microsoft has shaped the computing industry as we know it over the past two decades, what the company does or doesn’t do in the future is now less central to the continued development of the networked world as companies like Google begin to set trends by churning out increasingly powerful cloud computing apps.

The notion of cloud computing, as dubbed the next ‘big thing’ by researcher Gartner, is that IT capabilities are provided as a service through the internet and are therefore readily available on any supporting device connected to the web, as opposed to being installed on and thus only accessible directly through ones own machine. Companies such as Google, with their online emails and calendars that can sync with locally supported software and other capabilities such as Docs, a virtual suite complete with word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application, and Talk, a voiceover IP and instant messaging combo, are superb examples of early success stories based on this radical new method of computing set to shape the industry.

The idea has been widely adopted and gratefully received by the IT community, but many people have voiced their fears of losing data when ‘stored in a cloud’ and not locally, and privacy has been a hot potato amongst the long list of concerns. Apple have not helped to quash concerns recently after admitting to losing 10% of emails over a 2 day period through its MobileMe facility, a service harnessing the power of cloud computing to store information on a remote server that can be linked to and pulled down from by the iPhone as and when required.

So why aren’t people viewing Microsoft as a central player in this new era? Well, the biggest problem is that Windows was designed to be a success in an environment where one user used a specific machine to complete work, meaning all required software is installed locally. Having data rely on locally installed software means that Windows will struggle to keep up in a much more mobile age where data is freely available to be accessed and modified remotely… the cloud age.

Microsoft’s answer to this is the development of Midori, a stripped down operating system that is comparatively leaner than Windows, so much so that it will be centred on the Internet and thus do away with the current dependencies that tie XP and Vista to a PC. Midori is still one of many projects in the incubation phase of its development, and because of this not much is yet known about it, but many believe that the idea is to create a lightweight portable operating system that can easily be mated to many different applications. Gartner, who believe cloud computing will be as influential as e-business following the announcement that 3 industry leaders (Intel, HP and Yahoo) will be investing heavily by each opening a data centre dedicated to its development, have commented that the idea behind Midori is a sensible step for Microsoft.

One thing's for sure - if this is the way the industry is moving at least I'll have a decent excuse for being caught with my head in the clouds...