My predictions for Azure PDC announcements

1) Pricing for developers

Last week Amazon announced that beginning November 1, new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 instance for a year. This is a huge incentive to make their service appealing and approachable to the developer community.

Here are the highlights taken from http://aws.amazon.com/free/

For a long time “Make it less expensive to run my very small service on Windows Azure.” has been the top request on MyGreatWindowsAzureIdea and Microsoft has heard it loud and clear.

And based on the following video interview with Doug Hauger, General Manager of WIndows Azure, it sounds like something along the lines of addressing this will be announced at the PDC this year. (at video time: 1:00)

The stars are aligning for the good.