Benjamin Black, who helped create Amazon.com's EC2 Web service and spent time at Microsoft as a director of engineering, has established a branch office in Seattle for Sausalito, Calif.-based cloud computing startup Joyent.

Black joined Joyent as vice president of research last month and plans to build a small staff here. In addition, he said that Joyent's CTO, Jason Hoffman, is moving to Seattle from San Francisco.

Joyent's headquarters will remain in Sausalito, but Black said most of the engineering and development work will occur in Seattle.

"They were really starting to feel the pain of having a completely distributed development organization. Communication overhead can really be a killer when you want to move very quickly," he said. "So it all worked out that converging here would work for everybody."

Black said the new office will focus on creating software for businesses so they can build, deploy and operate a variety of online applications. That's a hot area right now in software development, especially given Microsoft's announcements last week at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

Black said he was ready to leave Microsoft, adding that the software giant -- despite the announcement last week of "Windows Azure" -- has no idea how to build online services. In his view, Amazon is far, far ahead because it has the "ship early, ship often mentality that you will find common in successful online services."

Founded in 2004, Joyent has never raised venture funding. It employs about 20 people. Black worked at Amazon from 2002 to 2006 and Microsoft from 2006 to this year.

UPDATE: Interestingly, GigaOm also covered Joyent today, reporting that the company's revenue continues to grow despite the slowing  economy.