Wait so you can create a website free with Silverlight and Azure or something?

3. Office 2010 - The biggest news of all out of there Office 2010 announcement today is that there will be free versions of the Office suite software available online to all Windows Live members. Some could say they are canabalizing one of their own core business sectors, but there are gains to be made and they will most likely be skimmed down versions where corporate users will still want the desk top versions. The free versions will be ad supported so there is a revenue stream there.

I would say the main reason they are doing this is more like the reason that large supermarkets drop the price of their fruit and vegetables when a fruit n veg store opens nearby. Chase them out of business and then enjoy your monopoly again. I think MS are afraid of Open Office

1. Zune HD. I don't really know if the actual product is good, but as long as the don't release it in Europe it will be a failure.

2. Silverlight 3. Anything better than flash is always good. Optimize it and make it compatible with Linux, the product itself will be a win. But it might be very hard to remove flash from there.

3. Office 2010. I don't really see the point to upgrade. But it will sell anyway.

4. Windows 7. Better performance compared to Vista, a win .

5. Azure. No idea, will see how it goes.

6. Natal. Difficult to know if it is going to work. I don't really believe it, not impressed.

7. Streaming music. That's always good, but I don't use those kind of services.

8. Updated 360 Dashboard. Always good to have new features, it won't matter for hardcore gamers tho.

9. Win Mobile 7. If the improvment is as big as Win 7, it's a win.

I was hoping it would be something like Google App Engine where you get a little bit of free bandwidth.  As long as you have a page to display Silverlight, you can us it, it doesn't have a relationship with Azure.  But unfortunately, MS is not offering free bandwidth for Azure: ( http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/microsofts-azure-gets-a-business-model-and-an-official-release-date/ ). 

"Pricing for Azure’s OS is $0.12 cents an hour for computing and $0.15 cents per Gigabyte per month for storage."

I could still have a web site for very cheap since I am quite sure I would not use that much bandwidth.  I would basically just be playing around with the technology.  I looked into using Google Apps but I did not care for writing it in Python.  They recently added Java support, so I may have to look back into it.

When you have Billions of customers I think it very likely they have millions of happy customers.

Silverlight is a proprietary platform that basically allows building web-based rich client applications over the .Net virtual machine.

The smooth-streaming tech demoed a few weeks ago is a good trojan horse for its adoption, but it's silly confusing what is basically an application with a software platform. The Silverlight platform could be too heavy in requirements to be used in many mobile and lightweight devices, exactly like even the complete Flash environment was too much for the iPhone and a cut-down version was used as an ad-hoc application for YouTube playing.

My prevision is that alternative techniques of smooth-streaming will be proposed first in Flash and then based on simpler, neutral and open technologies to cannibalize this space (HTML 5 video and HTTP streaming future specifications, etc) just like HTML+CSS+AJAX did grow into a universal platform for web applications.

Going back to the OP, Windows 7 will be well received, especially in stark contrast with Vista's troubled launch. The great mistery is Azure imo.

^^I think Flash already has an alternative to smooth streaming. Not sure how it compares to Silverlight's though.

Also, the media being streamed through Silverlight Smooth Streaming must be hosted on an IIS 7.0 server. It is actually IIS that is handling the chunking of the content. Silverlight just knows how to handle it.

That's quite natural, being a MS tech. An equivalent server-side tech would have to be integrated into Apache or other http servers or come as a standard reusable module, that comes without saying.

Basically the tipping point of adoption of alternative techs will be with hugely popular services such as YouTube, same as HTML 5 video.

In light of the recent earnings report, should MS change anything about their strategy?

^ Probably not, the Xbox 360 revenue was $5.6B, cost of revenue was $4.3B (thats Xbox 360 + others) and the cost of revenue fell in spite of increased console sales.