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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."
I've been writing Windows apps since 3.1. Microsoft couldn't write a decent API if their lives depended on it. They manage to take simple concept, and bury under layer upon layer of useless complexity. Too often their documentation doesn't give examples, and the only way to find out what something does is it sit around and experiment with it. Take the absurd DirectX: you *have* to use it, but even today it takes pages to get a window on the screen and the documentation is useless. Remember Microsoft OLE? Such a simple thing made so hard. I want to code in as few a lines as possible. I don't want to write pages of COM declarations. Worse of all is their DirectShow - put a video on the screen. It's a mess of pins and connectors. Ugh!
Although I'm a Windows programmer by training, I've been spreading my wings and it's nice to use APIs that are simpler and more elegant. I can write code to do what I want to do, instead of wasting days with my nose buried in absurdly thick reference books trying to understand what they were trying to do. It's like the people at Microsoft who spend their time writing APIs never have to actually use one.
So Microsoft Cloud? No, thanks. Cloud may turn out to be another flash-in-the-pan fad, but even so I'd rather use a cleaner API by someone else. Microsoft have a lousy track record. Thanks, but no thanks.
Hopefully this means proper standards for IE8 and JS3 support?
If Microsoft owns the desktop, browser, server, and data center, what's going to motivate them to follow standards?
Developers: We can use your help.
I, personally, would be THRILLED, if I could sit down at any broadband-connected PC in the world and get the same desktop and files that I have at home. I've played with Ulteo, and it is close - but clearly needs some time and manpower thrown at it. If there was a mature, polished version of Ulteo that could do what other OSs can do, I'd probably be willing to give up my Macs as well as my Windows/Ubuntu machine.
Can MS pull it off? I doubt it, but I'm glad that they are trying.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Windows 7 is losing core applications and replacing them with an installer to download them...
Coming in Windows 8: repos.