“Three screens and a cloud.”

That’s how both Chief Software Ray Ozzie and CEO Steve Ballmer repeatedly described the future of computing in general over this past year.

Inside Microsoft’s crystal ball, traditional desktop computing is decreasing as applications move up into the internet, and a new generation of lightweight ‘screens’ (thin clients, mobile devices, and network-enabled televisions) become the three prevailing client-side hardware models.

It’s a good little slogan - and about as unambiguous an endorsement of the conventional wisdom on the bright future of cloud computing as one could imagine.

Microsoft has had its share of advertising/PR issues over the last few years (think Jerry Seinfeld as a symbol of forward-thinking 21st century coolness, or the Windows 7 launch party infomercial).  It would be a shame if similar promotional missteps end up preventing the Microsoft Azure initiative from garnering the media buzz it deserves, though, because the company is every bit as dedicated to the cloud as the above quote would suggest – and they’re putting their money where Ray’s and Steve’s mouths are.

Consider the Chicago data center (pictured at left), part of the massive global build-out of the Azure infrastructure that occurred over the past year.  Completed this past June, the facility occupies 700,000 sq. ft. - the size of 12 US football fields.  To populate a data center this size, 40 ft. shipping containers are packed full of servers and installed as power-efficient and easier-cooling modules (note to the firm handling Microsoft’s PR: that would make some pretty servicable B-roll news segment footage).

Sadly, though, the remarkable physical build-out of Azure has been one of the more overlooked stories of 2009, and as the service is poised to go live for the enterprise tomorrow on New Years Day, there remains relatively little coverage in the general or trade media.

So what is Azure?

While some have characterized Microsoft’s cloud computing initiative as playing catch-up to Amazon’s EC2  and Google’s App Engine (both of which have been up and running for a year or more), there are a few key differences between the three competing services:

To use Amazon’s EC2, you’ll first have to configure and upload your own virtual server instance and database (originally OS choices were limited to Unix and Solaris, but now EC2 offers Windows Server and several flavors of Linux as well).  Once your virtual server is up in the Amazon cloud, load balancing, failover and scalability (the ‘E’ stands for ‘Elastic’) are taken care of for you – yet ongoing system administration remains largely up to the user.

Google’s App Engine, on the other hand, takes a higher level approach: users manage the system via a simple web dashboard interface - the underlying operating system is completely abstracted from the user.  However, such ease of use comes at a price: Google App Engine developers are also currently limited to coding in Python or a Java-compliant (JVM) language, with only a limited API available beyond that.

To sum up, EC2 is essentially ‘cloud-hardware’ upon which the user chooses and is responsible for administering her own operating system and database.  This provides flexibility and is well-suited to migrating exiting apps to the cloud – but essentially, it’s a transposition of existing data center technology to the cloud rather than a designed-from-the-ground-up, cloud-optimized platform.  On the other hand, Google’s App Engine and Azure are designed-from-the-ground-up, cloud-optimized platforms, and as such both provide certain advantages (for example, greater ease of development, deployment, and maintenance).

That’s where the similarities between Azure and the App Engine ends, though – because while Microsoft comes to the party a bit later than the competition, Azure is a fundamentally more comprehensive and powerful cloud solution than the App Engine.  For example, while the Google platform is limited to either interpreted languages (Python) or virtual machine languages (Java et al.), Azure offers the choice of a wide variety of languages, including compiled C++, object-oriented C#, and interpreted VB.net.  And Azure isn’t just limited to Microsoft languages - via the underlying .Net platform, you can also develop in languages such as Ruby, PHP, or even Java (in fact, Azure deployment is as tightly integrated within the popular open source Java Eclipse development environment as it is from within Visual Studio).

Interoperability?  Microsoft has gotten religion.

Again, an EC2 Windows virtual server instance offers much the same flexibility – but again, Azure is a comprehensive cloud platform rather than a data center machine moved up to the cloud – and there are advantages to that.  Of course, the success of these three competing cloud services will also ultimately depend on the performance and reliability of each of the underlying network infrastructures – but in terms of functionality, we believe Azure might offer the best of both worlds: the advantages of a natively designed cloud-based platform, yet with the coding flexibility enterprises and developers expect.