Comments on: Microsoft’s cloud strategy reaches for the stars

By: Bruce Robertson

Bruce Robertson — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:39:09 +0000

If what Nick says is true, then they want to compete with Amazon. We might note, however, that Amazon is doing what it does without talking about ANY of these issues publicly. They just provide the service, and you use it if you want it, but you don’t get to see how they built it. Here, they’re spending TOO MUCH TIME talking about how they built it, and not enough on how it can or will be used. I’ll make that a question, since I’m not at PDC listening; I’m just reading your blog entries.

So, the real question here is: can MSFT compete as a service provider in a services business. IBM has made this transition. Can MSFT?

By: Jeff Mann

Jeff Mann — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:03:16 +0000

The section on Dynamics is valuable, but more appropriate for a longer piece than a first take.
Is this aimed at ISVs or enterprises, or both? Can users create a walled cloud just for their own use? I didn’t see that positioning addressed.

By: matt cain

matt cain — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:13:53 +0000

i’d like to see a little competitive positioning in the piece– how does this compare to amazon, google, et al. are they ahead, behind, orthogonal? nothing to deep– just a couple of lines.

By: Nick Gall

Nick Gall — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:51:38 +0000

“Microsoft’s offerings are initially hosted only in Microsoft data centers and provide operating system.”

Microsoft has been very clear that they have no plans to EVER allow third parties to “run” Azure in their datacenters. Not end users. Not hosting providers. We should state that clearly in the FT.

By: Whit Andrews

Whit Andrews — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:09:19 +0000

This is a full event note — I’m with Dan. Also, I would want to know if there are interoperability promises here — so, is Microsoft staing how and if it can accomplish interoperability with Other Clouds (Amazon, etc.)?

By: Dan Sholler

Dan Sholler — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:06:28 +0000

David,
You do not mention anything about the cost of doing this and the service levels that can be purchased. I think you have outlined the opportunities and challenges, but without knowing what the costs are, it is pretty hard to give anyone any sort of recommendations.

You have way too much for a first take here.

If you are going to do a full note, then my suggestion would be to position what microsoft is offering against the known and speculative cloud workloads.
For example, we know that some people are already using cloud providers as “overflow” capacity (I do not know if we have an official term for this). So are the Microsoft offerings a good choice for that use case? There is also the classic hosted commerce site that Amazon has done so well, is Microsoft competing in that use case? I think this would help, because the challenge that we all face with these things is that they are too open ended, and framing the discussion and recommendations in terms of the use cases would make it much more tangible.

My TOH use cases:
Overflow
E-commerce
Web-site hosting
B2B community
SaaS provider (various categories)

My guess is that Overflow makes sense, except that the fragmentation makes that challenging in all but simple cases. They do not have e-commerce built out, site hosting is a good idea, B2B community is interesting (especially with hosted ESB) but risky as it has not been tried with this stuff yet, and I am sure we have existing opinion about the various MSFT SaaS offerings.

Would also be interesting to view this in light of any partner commitments that were made at the show.