Microsoft announced the launch of Live Mesh, a web-based software system that represents the company's late entry into a field that has become known as cloud computing.

Live Mesh represents a major shift for Microsoft, which has spent years fighting -- and winning -- the battle for the desktop. But that battle left Microsoft open to attack from the likes of Google, which has populated the web with free software designed to undercut Microsoft's dominance.

"This is a pretty significant public statement that the battle is really a cloud battle," Mark Stahlman, a research vice president at Gartner, an industry consulting group, told The New York Times. "It's not an ad search battle or a desktop operating system battle. Those are fought and won already. This is the one that's wide open."

While the cloud may be wide open, Microsoft isn't exactly in the lead. Earlier this month, Google announced that it had begun integrating its suite of online software with Salesforce.com's online enterprise applications.

Microsoft plans to test Live Mesh with about 10,000 software developers, as it looks to refine the platform the company believes will be at the center of the next computing evolution.