At PDC this week we have seen Microsoft set out their stall for the next few years and to be honest, it all looks pretty good.

Azure will underpin the Microsoft cloud whilst the likes of Windows 7 and Office 14 will look to that cloud for storage, synchronisation, collaboration and advanced services. New third party applications will be deployed into the cloud which can then be run on any device, anywhere. All good stuff.

And to support all of this, Microsoft is spending big bucks on massive data centres all over the planet. After all, these clouds don’t run themselves and you need lots and lots and lots of servers and petabytes of storage to do this kind of thing.

And we know that these data centres will be built properly with redundant power and great security and that the data will be synchronised between multiple centres so that if one is lost, the user will not be affected. Great!

But here is the problem. Whilst the platform may be secure, a US government official can approach Microsoft and demand access to everything that you have stored on their servers without a warrant and without having to disclose the reason why they want to look. Say hello to the USA Patriot Act.

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You may recall my post about this event that took place in London back at the beginning of the month where Steve Ballmer gave a great (all be it misreported) keynote speech.

Well the videos for that are now available online (no registration required).

The full list can be found here however the real interesting videos are (and has anybody noticed that somebody has managed to spell Steve Ballmers name wrong):

Steve Ballmer Part 1 – Microsoft’s Vision for Software Delivered as a Service

Steve Ballmer Part 2 – Microsoft’s Vision for Software Delivered as a Service

Bruce Lynn – Taking Virtualisation to the Next Level

And what I think was the most impressive

The New National Rail Enquiries Website

So take a look, download the slides and watch the videos and you tell me what you think Steve announced

Since the spring of 2007 I have carried a HTC S710 Smart Phone with me everywhere I have gone. When I bought it, I was nervous about moving away from a touch screen based device (I had an iMate JamIn before) but I soon realised that the QWERTY keyboard more than made up for the lack of a touch screen and so over the last 20 months the phone has been used to the full extent of it’s capabilities, tethered to a corporate Exchange 2007 server with push email as I have travelled around Europe and North America.

Note taking, browsing, email, and even phone calls have all been in the palm of my hand with 100% reliability and pretty good performance. Indeed I have got to a point where these days, for 80% of meetings, my laptop now stays at home because the S710 does everything I need and just slips into my pocket.

But 20 months is by far the longest time I have kept the same phone and there are a whole range of new phones on the market this quarter trying to tempt me to upgrade and compared to them my little S710 is looking somewhat dated but just what is a worthy replacement?

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