Why Microsoft is afraid of "karmic koala"

As you know, on Friday, Mark Shuttleworth announced a new distribution Ubuntu 9.10, which will be released in October 2009 and will be supported until April 2011. The release received the code name “Karmic Koala”. A unique feature of the “karmic bear” will be the built-in cloud computing engine. The distribution kit will integrate the Eucalyptus system, which will allow creating a cloud infrastructure based on its own cluster, and there will also be support for standard Amazon APIs for connecting to the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Cloud computing is now one of the most fashionable technologies, and many companies, including Microsoft with their Azure, have already announced developments in this direction. Previously, the Redmond giant managed to appear later and grab the largest piece of the pie, but now this number may not pass. The problem here is that a large army of developers and 10 million users are behind Ubuntu. Development in this area can go completely in the direction in which Microsoft would like.

Mark Shuttleworth said that they do not want to bind the user to a specific cloud computing service, and everyone should be able to easily connect to any of the existing such services. Just as Amazon has become today the de facto standard in the field of cloud computing, so the approach of Ubuntu on the free choice of the cloud computing provider can easily become a generally accepted standard. And this is no longer beneficial to Microsoft.
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via Negative Approach