The revolutionary aspects of Azure have barely been touched on by all the commentary about the new cloud computing offering.
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Windows Azure: Why Microsoft Better Get it Right
READER FEEDBACK
Rurik Bradbury Mon, 2008-11-03 11:46
Interesting article, though I take issue with a couple of things:
1: the 'price advantage' over hosting providers due to licensing does not exist. The royalties those other hosts pay to MS becomes Microsoft's margin (pure profit). So if Microsoft eliminated that license fee cost from the top-line price, it would be left with a low-margin hosted product. Wall Street would not be happy.
2: Microsoft apps are much more demanding to deploy and maintain than, say, Google Apps. So Microsoft will lose if it really starts a price war. However, it's true that they could narrow the cost difference enough via volume sales to make MS hosted apps much more attractive than Google based on more powerful features.
Overall I agree with you that the big news here is the potential to coopt the legions of Windows developers. The question is: how much freedom can a cloud give those developers to do their own thing, bugs, warts and all, before the stability and security of the cloud is compromised?
Cloud offerings have been rudimentary until now, and this 'freedom vs locked-down' question has not been resolved. Microsoft is at least offering a new vision, whether it works out or not.
Rurik Bradbury
www.unison.com
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