Amazon launches pre-emptive strike against Microsoft’s planned cloud platform

Microsoft is gearing up to go big with its plans for its own version of its hosted development platform later this month. But Amazon.com isn’t sitting idly by, waiting for Microsoft to rain on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
On October 1, Amazon announced that it plans to offer developers this fall the ability to run Windows Server or SQL Server via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). According to the Amazon Web Services site, “the ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability.”
more http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1615