Microsoft To Offer Azure Credits To Compete With IBM, AWS

Amanda Parker writes Google, AWS and IBM already offer incentives for start-ups to join them. Microsoft is trying to lure start-ups and SME's to its Azure profile by offering them $500,000 in Azure credits. The deal, announced by Y Combinator, is only available to Y Combinator-backed companies and will be offered to the 2015 Winter and future batches. In addition to this, Microsoft is also giving Y Combinator start-ups a three years Office 365 subscription, access to Microsoft developer staff and one year of free CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services. The move signifies Microsoft's desire to compete with Amazon Web Services and Google, both of whom already offer credits and freebies.

Comments

I talked to the wife.

[Anonymous Coward]

I talked it over with my wife and she just doesn't like that color.

Sorry Microsoft.

Maybe change it to mauve.

Is IBM a real cloud hosting competitor?

[leonbev]

I'm not sure why IBM is listed as being a major competitor to AWS and Azure for cloud hosting. I always thought that Rackspace,Google, and Salesforce.com were bigger players in that arena.

Re:Is IBM a real cloud hosting competitor?

[qbzzt]

IBM recently bought SoftLayer, and is now offering a cloud with a bunch of additional enterprise services at https://console.ng.bluemix.net... .

Required disclaimer: While I am an IBM employee, my opinions are my own and do not represent the IBM corporation. In fact, being a publicly traded corporation, I don't think IBM can have opinions other than "it is good to fulfill one's fiduciary duties".

so to highlight how this has gone so far.

[nimbius]

at first, microsoft offered Azure to the general public with a free trial and a smile. AWS, VPS, dedicated hosting, and shared hosting already existed, and offered an endless selection of linux and bsd whereas microsoft offered exactly 1 linux image and it was nearly double the cost of windows.

Then microsoft buttered up corporations with free azure credits in their licensing fees. Refusal of the credits meant an increase in fees, so most corporations took them only to realize they werent very applicable. Hosted exchange an in-house microsoft products were still in most cases more established and cheaper than Azure. They afforded greater accountability and control over the reboot cycle as well. Microsoft recently started revoking, quietly, these credits.

now, like a drunken pimp, microsoft is peddling azure to...startups. Most of these companies are actively developing and using technologies that scale far beyond Windows and traditional servers, and always have. What for microsoft is a new offering is something these companies have already established api code and configuration automation with. Yes, you can convert from X provider to azure easily, but microsoft hasnt offered a compelling reason why you should outside of pricing. And then theres the glaring problem of portability and relevance. Microsofts other internet offerings, bing and explorer, no seasoned developer or devops engineer can approach on a full stomach. decades of lock in, embrace extend extinguish, and the fond memory of the last pain-in-the-ass bug they had to code around for IE because it was a "market leader" is largely enough to make them skip it. Microsoft hasnt given any compelling evidence to suggest they wont lock in the infrastructure you build, but they have provided a wealth of historical evidence to suggest they plan to.