So, what has been foreshadowed and rumored over the past couple of months was recently officially announced by Microsoft in yet another fairly lengthy post on the Building Windows 8 blog: The company will be ditching the Windows Live brand. The products will continue to exist, of course, but they will no longer be under the umbrella of the Windows Live branding; instead, everything will be unified through what is called a Microsoft Account, formerly known as a Windows Live ID. We’ll have SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Messenger as services, which will be accessible on Windows 8 via the SkyDrive, Mail, and Messaging apps, respectively (this begs the question; is the future bleak for the actual Windows Live Messenger client?)

The wizards at InfiniteApple, a recently-established Apple-related blog have found out that Apple’s iCloud online services actually use third-party services, namely Amazon Cloud Services and Windows Azure.

If you’ve watched Microsoft concept videos over the years, you probably know how fond the company is of the idea of “Software Plus Services”. Microsoft has always painted it as the ability to preserve local software, while still have it interact with online services in real time. While Microsoft has made quite a few achievements in that area in the past few years, isn’t Apple about to nail it with iCloud?

Scott Guthrie has announced the availability of Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio March 2009 CTP in his keynote address at MIX conference in Vegas.

Microsoft today released a new updated CTP for Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2008. Both the updates are labeled as January 2009 CTP.
Windows Azure SDK provides developers with the APIs, tools, documentation, and samples needed to develop Internet-scale applications that run on Windows Azure .