Amazon and Microsoft are about to be partners – and competitors.

Last night, Amazon’s Werner Vogels announced that later this fall developers and companies will be able to run Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which up to now has been limited to Linux or other Unix-based systems. Given the broad popularity of the Microsoft operating system, the move promises to considerably expand the usefulness of the EC2 utility-computing system. According to Amazon:

Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server provides an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. By choosing Amazon EC2 as the deployment environment for your Windows-based applications, you will be able to take advantage of Amazon’s proven scalability and reliability, as well as the cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing model offered by Amazon Web Services.

As Vogels notes, it will also become possible to run virtual Windows desktops from Amazon’s cloud.

Details about pricing have yet to be released. The big question, as Alan Williams notes, is this: Will Microsoft adopt a true utility pricing model for virtual computers running Windows, allowing Amazon to roll the operating system licensing cost into its hourly fee, or will the Windows licenses have to continue to be purchased separately? If it’s the former, Microsoft will have made a significant step forward into the utility world.

But an even bigger step into the cloud appears imminent. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced in London today that the company will unveil its own “cloud operating system” at its big developer conference at the end of this month. According to The Register, Ballmer said: “We need a new operating system designed for the cloud and we will introduce one in about four weeks, we’ll even have a name to give you by then. But let’s just call it for the purposes of today ‘Windows Cloud.'” Ballmer also said: “The last thing we want is for somebody else to obsolete us; if we’re gonna get obsoleted, we better do it to ourselves.” Even as it links up with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft is preparing to muscle onto its turf.

Clive Thompson recently pointed to a post in which Amherst College’s IT director provided some stats about the school’s new freshman class. The students’ tech habits are pretty much what you’d expect – everyone’s on Facebook, no one has a landline, laptops have almost entirely supplanted desktops, and the Mac’s beating the PC.

What I found most striking, though, were the stats on email. About 180,000 emails are received each day at the school (which has around 1,600 students), and 94% of those emails are spam. The storage required for the emails received last year equaled the total storage required for all the emails received in the preceding five years combined. And 95% of email storage now goes to holding email attachments rather than the messages themselves. Email has become everyone’s personal data warehouse.

With the management of email systems growing increasingly onerous, it’s hardly a surprise that a lot of colleges are choosing to offload those systems to Google and other cloud providers.

Free software activist Richard Stallman is taking a break from his campaign to stop people from buying Harry Potter books to blast the concept of cloud computing. “It’s stupidity,” he tells the Guardian. “It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign.” He’s right, of course, about the “marketing hype campaign,” but his real beef with the cloud is the same as his beef with corporate-owned software programs. “Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program,” he says. “If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.”

And while you’re at it, stock your cellar with lots of canned goods.

Stallman is a little late to this party. People have been voting for web apps, at least in rudimentary form, since back in the heyday of AOL. And they’re going to continue using Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, TurboTax Online, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Photobucket, Twitter, etc., just as they’re going to continue to buy J.K. Rowling’s books. Why? Because, for better or worse, they like ’em. It’s a done deal.

More on target was Larry Ellison’s rant against the cloud last week:

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

It’ll stop as soon as the computer industry succeeds not only in rendering the term “cloud computing” meaningless but also in draining it of its marketing oomph, at which point the industry will move on to a new buzzphrase. Same as it ever was.

But the technology of utility computing, unlike the hype about the cloud, will continue on its appointed course, and, no doubt, Larry Ellison will be there at the appropriate time to ensure that Oracle milks the utility model for whatever profits it can churn out. Oracle is the giant cockroach of the IT business – it thrives under any conditions. That’s because Oracle, though based in Silicon Valley, is not of the Valley. Ellison long ago came to understand one of the fundamental truths about the corporate IT business: there’s more money to be made in exploiting old technology than in pioneering new technology. Hedge your bets, bide your time until the cash begins to flow, then make your move.

A few months ago, Oracle announced that, with its software-as-a-service business growing at nearly a 25% a year clip, it was breaking ground on a big new data center in Utah to help power its web apps. And at the very same conference at which Ellison went on his anti-cloud rant, Oracle announced an extensive partnership with Amazon Web Services to incorporate Oracle products into the Amazon cloud.

It’s healthy for big guns like Ellison to shoot holes in the cloud hype. But also keep your eyes on what Oracle is actually doing at ground level. Cockroaches don’t lie.

Stephen Colbert and I chat about the Net and the future of man:

Give it up.

Programming note: I will be a guest on the Colbert Report on Comedy Central tomorrow (Thursday) night. Tune in.

Recent months have brought a burst of innovation in data centers. We have seen data centers in semitrailers, data centers in caves, data centers in Siberia, data centers in the Las Vegas desert, and data centers that float in the middle of the ocean. Today we have word, via Data Center Knowledge, that Microsoft has been testing data centers in tents. (They’re calling it In Tents Computing.)

What’s next? Here’s my prediction of the ten top data center innovations we’ll see over the course of the next year:

1. Data centers in blimps

2. Data centers in shoes

3. Data centers in termite nests

4. Data centers implanted under the skin of people’s forearms

5. Data centers in canoes

6. Data centers constructed entirely of post-consumer waste

7. Data centers rolled in seaweed like maki

8. Data centers worn by Japanese schoolgirls

9. Data centers in trees

10. Data centers as figments of the imagination

Sun Microsystems reportedly has a working prototype of a data center in a kangaroo’s pouch, but that’s unconfirmed.

It was painful to watch, at Apple’s big media event on Monday, Steve Jobs attempting to pawn off a retread music-recommendation system as some sort of great technological breakthrough. Yes, iTunes will now be able to suggest songs you might like based on what you and other like-eared users listen to. Wow. That’s so 2002. And the company even has the gumption to call the feature Genius. A better name, if the experiences of early users are any guide, would have been Halfwit.

But that’s nothing. Today, reports New Scientist, Apple has applied for a patent to – no joke – extend digital rights management to tennis shoes and other articles of clothing. “What is desired,” the patent application says, “is a method of electronically pairing a sensor and an authorized garment.” It continues:

As used herein an authorized garment is a garment sanctioned to be electronically paired with an authenticated (i.e., certified) sensor. Once the garment and sensor are electronically paired, the sensor can receive (and in some cases process) sensing information (such as garment performance data or user performance data) received from the garment. Since only authorized garments are configured to electronically pair with authenticated sensors, a user (or manufacturer) can be assured that the sensing data received by the sensor is both accurate and consistent with its intended use (a sensor designed for use with running shoes can not properly be used with dance shoes, for example).

Apple views tennis-shoe DRM as a way to head off what it sees as a potential plague of sneaker hacking. “Some people,” the patent application observes, “have taken it upon themselves to remove the sensor from the special pocket of the [iPod-linked] Nike+ shoe and place it at inappropriate locations (shoelaces, for example) or place it on non-Nike+ model shoes.” Oh my God: Geeks are ripping the sensors out of their sneakers and sticking them on their shoelaces! Unleash the shoe nazis!

It used to be cool to be an Apple fanboy. Now it’s starting to be embarrassing.