I'm not a big fan of reaching for conclusions and unjustified criticism when it comes to tech journalism, because I see it way too often. But although I have no solid data to confirm it, I can't help the feeling that Steve Ballmer's announcement of a new OS from Microsoft and its foray into cloud computing, temporarily dubbed "Windows Cloud," seems rather strange.

At a Software plus Services partner event in London Ballmer said the following “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.” Essentially, it should be a bunch of services and products from Microsoft available in your browser in a simplified form. “We’re not driving an agenda towards being service providers but we’ve gotta build a service that is Windows in the cloud,” Ballmer added.

First of all, this sounds like a big deal, and Ballmer is just casually saying they'll have it out in a couple of weeks? Not Microsoft's style. For example, they announced their Live Mesh initiative (which is, btw, in many ways related to the concept of cloud computing) 5 months ago, and there's still not a word about a public or even a closed beta, let alone a finished product. (*correction: to clarify things further, a technical preview of Live Mesh is accessible to the general public. It is very far from a finished product. Furthermore, only users from a select few countries (I'm not in one of them) can get in without a wait list. More here.) Microsoft is big and slow, they announce stuff like this months before it's ready; so my guesstimate is that Ballmer's four weeks will turn into months really soon.

This is reiterated by the fact that they don't even yet have a name for the product. It's due out in a month, but it has no name? Again, it's simply not Microsoft's style, especially when it comes to an ambitious product like this; one that may very well prove if Microsoft is capable of competing with Google or not.

In a nutshell, it seems to me that Ballmer was simply reckless, talking about something that's most probably set in the distant future as it were an almost finished product coming to our browsers in a week or three. I expect it to go through long stages of alpha and beta testing before it's actually useful to the end user. Perhaps that's what Ballmer meant when he said it'll be out in a couple of weeks, but giving Google enough time to prepare countermeasures (if needed) is probably not the best course of action for Microsoft. In any case, we should hear more about it at the end of October at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

Ballmer pulled out another interesting observation at the event. According to him, Google is directly competing with Windows and they are building a browser-based OS. “If you talk to Google they’ll say it's thin client computing but then they’ll issue a new browser that’s basically a big fat operating system designed to compete with Windows but running on top of it,” he said. Whoa, Steve, are you sure about this? Because, from what I've heard, most developers think of the idea as preposterous.