Took the perilous journey to the wilds of San Diego last night to attend  "Cloud Computing : Impact on Business and Architecture."  This seminar was sponsored by the San Diego Software Industry Council (www.sdsic.org).

Microsoft provided the speakers, and the focus of the evening was on Microsoft's new public cloud environment called "Azure."  Probably to the speakers angst ( the speakers were Ned Curic - MS Platform Strategy Advisor, and Woody Pewitt - Technology Evangelist), much of the evening Q&A was taken up with question from the audience asking to compare Azure with services provided byu other cloud players such as Amazon and Google.

Much to the attendees angst, most of the answers were "I don't know," or "it is done with magic."