Windows Azure Offers Developers Iron-Clad Lock-in

snydeq writes "Microsoft's move to the cloud is certain to create a whole new kind of developer partner, Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes. But as much as Microsoft ISVs will likely go along with the shift to Windows Azure to keep revenue streams going, the kind of lock-in they will experience will be worlds away from what they face today. Rather than being able to ignore the new version of a key framework, developers will have no other option than to update their code to suit Microsoft's latest platform. That kind of lock-in will leave customers in the lurch, subject to their vendors' bottom lines, as ISVs that can't afford to rework code to keep up with Microsoft's latest platform will begin dropping services, and customers will have little choice but to accept the new terms of service their vendors send along."

Comments

No serious enterprise customers will adopt this

[morgan_greywolf]

Constantly locked in to a upgrade path? No, way. No way will anyone go for this for anything real.

Ms is better at legacy support than anyone

[timmarhy]

this is bullcrap. MS is better than ANYONE at providing legacy support for old platforms. look at how long win32 stuck around? STILL works. backward compatability is one of the corner stones of MS's business. IMHO they can't win no matter what they do, if they break legacy support to fix things like security they end up taking heat like they have over vista, if they continue legacy support like they have been doing they take heat of lack of features and security.

This guy has just blown out a load of basless speculation and your all buying into it (any giving him page hits).

Re:Well...

[fermion]

Writing good code is expensive. This is one of the reasons why MS is so popular. It allows developers to write bad code that will still runs, is still sufficiently maintainable, and does the job with minimum reliability. This is why good code, which was never really in fad to begin with, never really took off. Even with modern tools, writing good portable code is largely cost prohibitive.

This is why the PHB might not fall into this new trap. It seems that MS is trying to force good coding practices, with new fangled ideas like the MVC pattern. It may become easier to write bad code on an existing long term stable system than invest in the highly skilled, and invariably annoying people, that can write code that is so abstracted that components can be changed out on the fly. After all the MS philosophy is machines are cheaper than people, so it is better to buy more machines to run inefficient and buggy code that to pay people to write efficient and reliable code.