Wordpress.Com was never moving to Microsoft's Azure Cloud.

Microsoft:
"...WordPress is also a tremendous ISV who's been working extensively with Windows Azure during the CTP...."
Wordpress:
"A: No. WordPress.com, which is Automattic's hosted blogging service, is going to stay on its existing infrastructure."

from www.guardian.co.uk

"One company I'd like to highlight is Automattic, developer of WordPress. WordPress is one of the most successful and pervasive blogging systems in existence today, used by tens of millions of bloggers worldwide. WordPress is also a tremendous ISV who's been working extensively with Windows Azure during the CTP...."

Internal Microsoft emails show that most 'Live Spaces' blogs were dead

Wordpress.com isn't getting 30m Live Spaces users - think of a much smaller number. No, smaller than that. And Microsoft isn't getting Wordpress to shift to Azure either. (Updated)

Is Wordpress.com getting all those Windows Live Space users really that much of a coup? There was plenty of excitement on the Windows Live Space blog and the Wordpress.com blog about how "30 million" (say it in a Dr Evil voice) blog would get moved over from Windows Live Spaces to Wordpress because, um, well, nice weather we're having... Nobody seemed able to explain quite why. Or, in other words, Microsoft had signally failed to monetise those blogs. (Couldn't it have done what Mark Zuckerberg did with Facebook and just let it grow? Anyway.)

Now Joe Wilcox at Betanews says he has obtained copies of internal Microsoft emails which suggest that 99% of those 30m blogs are "dead".

The email exchange dates from 28 September, Wilcox says, the day after the announcement. Wilcox says he's not naming the participants because that might mean trouble for those involved. (Er, yes.)

"It's not unusual for companies like Microsoft to overstate statistics that aren't otherwise easily confirmed. There's often huge PR advantage in larger numbers, and reporters tend to assume the figures are correct, particularly when they can't otherwise easily be confirmed. Often lowly public relations employees make these kinds of decisions. In this case, the number means much to WordPress.com, which could conceivably double in size over six months if just half of Windows Live Spaces bloggers migrated to the Automattic service. As of September, WordPress.com hosted 13.9 million blogs."

"However, according to a senior Microsoft manger e-mailing colleagues: "The net is: 300k sites are expected to migrate of the 30M 'blogs' -- most are dead. Wordpress is adding somewhere in the order of zero servers to handle this capacity. This was a 'who has the best online service for blogging for our customers' and had nothing to do with technology."

But it turns out there's a little more to this than meets the eye. Microsoft would dearly love Automattic - the company behind Wordpress.com - to shift to using its Azure cloud system (it's like Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute system, better known as EC2). Last November at its Professional Developer Conference Microsoft suggested (or let it be thought) that Wordpress/Automattic is hosted on Azure, or would soon be moving over. From the transcript: "One company I'd like to highlight is Automattic, developer of WordPress. WordPress is one of the most successful and pervasive blogging systems in existence today, used by tens of millions of bloggers worldwide. WordPress is also a tremendous ISV who's been working extensively with Windows Azure during the CTP...."

But that isn't the case at all.

As the Automattic blog pointed out soon afterwards in an FAQ: "Q: Are you moving WordPress.com to Azure? A: No. WordPress.com, which is Automattic's hosted blogging service, is going to stay on its existing infrastructure. Martin Cron from the Cheezburger Network launched a new blog Oddly Specific on Azure, which some people confused with Automattic." Read more at www.guardian.co.uk