Microsoft’s Future Lies in Software and Data .

Microsoft today at itsdeveloper conference in Los Angeles unveiled itsPinpoint service, which looks kind of like an app store aimed at enterprise developers and customers using Microsoft’s Azure cloud offerings, albeit one that goes beyond mere apps. It also showed off a data repository, code-named Dallas, that offers developers access to a wide variety of public and fee-based data sets with which they can build useful programs.Dallas, which can be found in the Pinpoint market,strongly resembles the service shown off this year at DEMO from Austin, Texas-based Infochimps. It was also by far the most interesting element of Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s opening keynote, which highlighted what he called Redmond’s “three screens and cloud” view of the world.

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