What is changing in Sydney, Singapore, London, Amsterdam, Munich, Warsaw, Atlanta, Toronto and San Francisco?  I’m about to find out.

I’m at San Fransisco airport getting ready to board a plane to Sydney, Australia for the first stop in a 9-city tour for Windows Azure Platform University. My colleague, Owen Allen, (see Owen’s blog about the trip at http://owen-allen.com) and I will be conducting training for Microsoft salespeople, system integrators and independent software developers. We’ll be discussing how cloud computing and the Windows Azure Platform, specifically, will be changing the information technology world.

But, as they say in the American Society of Training and Development, “Telling ain’t training.” We will be learning, also. Along the way, we hope to learn from people how they see the world changing. What is their view on the current state and trends of such topics as the  economic environment, globalization, Internet commerce, energy, etc?

One observation I would already make is that the economy is still quite robust. While we read about the bad economic news every day–that foreclosures are still at record highs, that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could require trillions of dollars to reboot, that the Fed Reserve is pumping $700B to into the economy–it’s easy to lose sight that the American economy is still generating some $15 trillion dollars of output. That equates to an airport full of travelers. It’s clear that we can and will improve the economy and put the other 9.6 million people back to work.

It’ll be interesting to see, first hand, how the people in the other countries on this tour see their situations!