Microsoft Was Out of Line

Reuven Cohen, the founder of Enomaly, has been one of the brightest voices in the cloud computing revolution. Reuven, a self proclaimed Instigator, has been working tirelessly to get the word out about cloud computing. I first met Reuven on a plane ride from Austin to Chicago last year, and in that time he schooled me on everything “cloud”. I often refer to that trip as my cloud baptism. Since that trip I have stayed in touch and followed his activities. Reuven was responsible for the formation of the extremely popular Cloud Camp events. He also has started the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) to help pave the way for standards within cloud computing . Most recently he is the Instigator of something called the Cloud Computing Manifesto that will be announced this coming Monday (3/30/09).

A few of us who cover the cloud-o-sphere have been under embargo about this document and its upcoming announcement. I actually had the first opportunity to read this document last week and I had not planned on discussing it until Monday. Actually, I still do not plan on discussing the details of the document until Monday, as I promised; however, what I would like to talk about is the irresponsibility of Microsoft’s actions yesterday regarding this manifesto document. To be clear, Reuven Cohen, first and foremost is an entrepreneur and like all of us he is always looking for angles to create opportunities. Regardless, he has done some great work for the cloud computing community of which myself and software companies like Microsoft have benefited. Therefore, in an effort to coordinate this “Cloud Computing Manifesto”, he needed to share it with hundreds of organizations and numerous individuals, and all he asked the recipients were two questions in return. One, “Are you on board with this?”, and two, “Please keep it under wraps until the announcement date.”. In my opinion Microsoft was totally out of line to pre-announce the manifesto. Millions of analysts, developers, bloggers, and reporters honor Microsoft announcements all of the time and I feel it was completely hypocritical of Microsoft to jump the gun for selfish reasons, and pre-announce this document yesterday. It is obvious they have issues with the document and that is their right; however, they should have voiced their opinions about the document this coming Monday as will I.