Meet the New Windows Azure

What's interesting about this is MS is charging more for their own products than for non-Windows machines.

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/

I'd heard a speaker at an MS event (codecamp event) talking about how web hosting companies (and virtual machine companies) would charge more for windows to take advantage of MS marketing, but that hosting on MS servers was overall much less expensive, because of all the management tools.

MS charges more for Windows than for Linux. Sort of makes sense, maybe, but I wonder why that is. These numbers look a lot like Amazon's EC2 pricing. Perhaps MS have some floor pricing in effect such that they can't undercut other resellers?

Lots of really interesting things, I like they're bring git (although personally wish it supported hg) publishing, memcached protocol support etc.