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Microsoft Announces Windows Azure, Cloud-Based OS
snydeq writes "Microsoft today introduced Windows Azure, its operating system for the cloud. The OS serves as the underlying foundation of the Azure Services Platform to help developers build apps that span from the cloud to the datacenter, to PCs, the Web, and phones. Cloud-based developer capabilities are combined with storage, computational, and network infrastructure services, which are hosted on servers within Microsoft's global data center network."
It'll take baby-steps and corrections along the way, but so far this is the first real attempt at it.
Wrong. No Microsoft paycheck for you.
Google, Sun, Alexa, Amazon, GoGrid, Skytap, 3tera, Apache Hadoop, 3Par -- these companies/projects have all been doing cloud computing -- some for as long as the last 5 years. Microsoft is the johnny-come-lately here.
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If Microsoft owns the desktop, browser, server, and data center, what's going to motivate them to follow standards?
Erm, you might have a point on the desktop and the browser. Both are shrinking share. Server and data center never was wholly owned. Though they did get some good sports inserted in there, not enough of them will ascend to senior management to make a difference in the long run. They totally owned the laptops for a while but they're losing it on the laptops as netbooks are taking a good chunk. They're losing a bit even on desktops - I hear they just lost all of Russian schools. That's a bite right there. We had a good laugh with their attempts at HPC, but those folks do their own ROI math don'tcha know and they never had a chance there.
Folks in phones haven't given them much thought since they so publicly cannibalized their first partner there, and phones look like the high volume platform for the next decade. They could OEM systems, but that's a short trip to the grave as the top 20 OEMs deprecate their brand overnight for the sake of their own survival.
In short, a declining share of a declining market doesn't look good for continued growth. Long term outlook: negative.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Hey, happy to help. Grab a VNC client (there are lots of free ones for every platform) and set up your computer as a VNC server. If you've got a Mac it's one box you have to check.
It's kinda slow, but I'm pretty sure it'll be faster than an OS written in Javascript, running inside a web browser. Also, your data stays your own and you don't have to be beholden to Microsoft to use it.
Well, then, it is a good thing you don't know what the hell you are talking about.
This offering from Microsoft isn't about a web based office suite or webmail, it is foundational web services that allow businesses and developers to build websites and services while offloading the heavy lifting (such as writing distributed systems or load balancing). The primitives Microsoft is offering are similar to those Amazon already has: storage, database, compute, queueing. In general, you don't access these through your browser.
This isn't some new AJAXy Web 2.0 website. "The Cloud" is about outsourcing the building blocks of software--database, storage, compute--to someone else and paying for exactly what you use. Instead of buying your own machines, managing the fleet, and building or buying scalable software, you pay for a service and someone else takes care of all of that for you.
It is like the transition to the electric grid. Instead of paying for a generator and diesel upfront, you just pay for what you use from the electric company, and benefit from their economies of scale. This is utility computing.