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Redmond, Washington software colossus Microsoft is closer to a companywide strategy for coping with an upheaval in the software industry -- the shift from powerful desktop programs to more lightweight, inexpensive ones that run over the Internet.

Ray Ozzie, the man who replaced Bill Gates as Microsoft’s top technical thinker, says the $73 billion dollar company will compete with Amazon, IBM and other rivals in selling information storage space and computing power "in the cloud," that is distributed across massive data centers worldwide. The system, Windows Azure, will let companies and hobbyists alike build web-based programs without having to invest in their own server farms.

Competitors like Google have moved quickly to make programs that do much of the work of Microsoft's cash-cow Office suite -- but they do it over the Internet at little or no cost to the user, and can be updated frequently with new features and bug fixes.

Windows Azure is meant to be a broad "platform" for the cloud, much like Vista for PCs and Windows Mobile for phones and other devices. Microsoft's own programs will run on it, as will those made by outside companies.

Ozzie said Microsoft has learned enough managing its own Web sites and programs, anticipating Web traffic spikes and lulls and ramping up or dialing down capacity, that it's ready to market this expertise to others. 

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