This is a quote from a New York Times article late last week:

The National Science Foundation and the Microsoft Corporation have agreed to offer American scientific researchers free access to the company’s new cloud computing service. A goal of the three-year project is to give scientists the computing power to cope with exploding amounts of research data. It uses Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing system, which the company recently introduced to compete with cloud computing services from companies like Amazon, Google, I.B.M. and Yahoo. These cloud computing systems allow organizations and individuals to run computing tasks and Internet services remotely in relatively low-cost data centers. The new program was announced on Thursday [2/5/2010] at a news conference in Washington.

via Microsoft to Offer U.S. Scientists Free Cloud Computing – NYTimes.com

Cloud computing is one of the latest IT buzzwords. For those that are unfamiliar with the term, essentially any program or service transmitted via the internet can be considered cloud computing. An outside company runs the servers and software, and is responsible for maintenance, updates and technical issues. Users are charged for access. With cloud computing, software programs you use aren’t run from your personal computer, but are stored and accessed via the Web, typically within a Web browser. If you’ve ever used Google Gmail or Google Docs, you’ve been computing in the cloud.

Microsoft’s announcement comes two years after similar services were offered by Google and I.B.M. to some of the nation’s elite universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Maryland and the University of Washington. According to the NYTimes article, Microsoft hopes to differentiate their service by offering scientists a set of custom applications that simplify access to Azure (Microsoft’s cloud services operating system) and the use of older software applications like Microsoft Excel.

This is, however, a step backwards for Open Science. The agreement reached between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Microsoft only promotes the use of a proprietary data format and application platform — cloud equivalents of Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Windows. This does nothing but further entrench Microsoft’s dominance in the scientific computing marktet. Indeed, Microsoft has a track record of using standards that aren’t truly open and leveraging proprietary formats to block commercial rivals and/or free alternatives.

Why is there a time limit on the project? Microsoft could have taken a different path and instead made the service free for academic research without expiration. The company could look to the global business market for a revenue stream. Such an arrangement would have truly been an investment in U.S. science.