Significantly blew past the basic Exchange, SharePoint and SQL database hosting services was Microsoft's Ray Ozzie, with the Azure announcements at PDC tow thousand and nine, just recently. It is understood that the announcements had also blow right past Amazon EC2, as well as targets Microsoft at Google, Force. com, OpSource and a few others are offering hosting on demand, web services, and even, in the cloud, bus interconnection services.
Last year's Azure onion had been peeled back by Microsoft, and this had showed just how much more Microsoft really wants to do, than just to simply offer computing platforms or even hosted Microsoft products.
Link: Microsoft Makes Big Azure Announcements at PDC 2009 - B