Microsoft sets sights on Amazon with cloud offering

With Microsoft just launching its cloud service, some believe the company has mistimed the market; however, the company remains confident that its service will rival that of its biggest competitor, Amazon.

Microsoft is set to open a new service that competes with Amazon’s cloud offering, according to The New York Times. The company has been testing its service with customers over the past year, and feels confident enough to commit to match Amazon’s prices for its cloud service, the Elastic Compute Cloud.

Microsoft is not alone in its struggle for presence in the cloud market, as both Google and others are trying to do the same. A lot is at stake for Microsoft, The New York Times reported, since the cloud threatens its traditional business of selling software to be installed by users onto their machines.