% fortune -ae paul murphy

Whispers from a ghost: Windows 7 and cloud computing

Here's an announcement you won't have seen yet from Microsoft Azure Support:

Monday, October 31, 2011

To all Azure Solutions Customers:

We have revised our contact procedures to ensure that you derive maximum benefit from your investment in Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing Solutions.

Our Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing support platform and Customer Response Centre provides a central point of contact for account holders looking for effective and reliable technical assistance delivered in a timely fashion.

Before calling the Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing Response Centre please check our outages site to ensure that service to your account grouping is currently available.

Note that if your service appears functional but data and/or downloaded applications are inaccessible, we will regretfully not be able to help. Simply use your account identification to download new applications.

Before calling the Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing Solutions Resource Center please ensure that you have the following informations readily available:

Please keep a record of these numbers:

At Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing Solutions Resource Center we are committed to your satisfaction. All inquires are assigned identifiers and and may be recorded for your protection. Follow-up inquires must site the unique issue identifier.

To ensure that the support experience be most pleasant for you we have added two new features to the telephonic routing:

It sounds like a spoof doesn't it? but it's actually the ghost of a future to come: warning those naive enough to sign up for mission critical cloud computing that putting all your eggs in someone else's basket is right up there with handing your wallet to a mugger and hoping to get your drivers license and credit cards back after he takes the cash.


Paul Murphy wrote and published The Unix Guide to Defenestration. Murphy is a 25-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues.