Microsoft’s Azure is not Hailstorm, but what’s the point of it?

Microsoft has made its Azure cloud computing announcements at PDC, so now we know what it's doing: it is extending Windows 2008 Server into the online market so that programmers who develop applications in Visual Studio (and other things, see below) can test them locally and deploy them globally . Azure runs the same code but uses a hypervisor to distribute it across multiple machines and, next year, multiple data centres on different continents. Application management is automatic

The rest is here:
Microsoft's Azure is not Hailstorm, but what's the point of it?