Microsoft bets on cloud computing as Amazon suffers outage

My point is that I've been noticing a lot of "gotcha" being played, and being played the most by Microsoft. Something happens that grabs the attention of consumers and the blogosphere, you have some great contenders and people are excited about the idea as a whole. There are options, some good some bad, some great.

Then, along trudges Microsoft. They want to put their spin of the idea on the market, except it hardly works as well as other things out there, and there's a price tag. Point blank, they want you to pay for mediocrity. I'll provide examples:

Cloud computing --- Early competition: Amazon Web Services, AppEngine Microsoft jumps in: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080729-microsoft-bets...

Online music stores --- Early competition: iTunes, Rhapsody, Yahoo Microsoft jumps in: http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-opens-MSN-Music-store/2100-10...

Universal browser environments: --- Early competition: Adobe Air Microsoft jumps in: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/04/15/introducing-mi...

Now, I know not every one of these services has been free or open-source, but it just seems to me lately that Microsoft has been playing this very pointless game of copy, brand and monetize.

I would much rather see MS focus on fixing their operating system then try and compete with great ideas, that were flawlessly executed. I'll be honest, as soon as I saw that MS was wanting to bid, I immediately got less excited about cloud computing