LOS ANGELES: Microsoft Corp's venture into cloud computing will be successful if most people don't even know it is there, the executive in charge of the initiative said.

The software company's new Windows Azure service, set to be launched on January 1, will run customers' applications on its servers and provide capacity through its massive datacenters, helping websites stay up through spikes in demand which might otherwise paralyze them.

"For consumers, the best result of cloud computing is that they don't notice it," Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, said in an interview at the company's annual developers conference.