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Google Vows To Build Leading Cloud For Enterprise Windows, Swiping at Microsoft's Core Business (geekwire.com)
Google is going after a core part of Microsoft's cloud business, aiming to expand Google Cloud Platform's appeal to big companies that run the classic combination of Microsoft's Windows Server and SQL Server. From a report: Google Cloud Platform today announced pre-configured images for Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server Core on Google Compute Engine. The rollout includes support for high-availability, disaster-recovery and remote-management features used by big companies It's the latest move by Google Cloud Platform to catch up to Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. The search giant's cloud initiatives are led by Google senior vice president Diane Greene, co-founder and former CEO of VMware, who joined Google as an executive in late 2015 to bolster its efforts to win over big businesses. Greene is also a board member of Google's parent company Alphabet.
Why would anyone just hand that data over to state surveillance?
Similar to how Amazon tweaks and close-sources MySQL on Aurora.
Isn't Azure basically an attempt to address the non-Windows hosted/cloud alternatives... how does Google buying Windows licenses pose a threat to Microsoft? Wouldn't it be a bigger threat/opportunity to assist companies move away from the Microsoft environment?
It just reeks of "it ain't done till [google] don't run."
AWS has Palo Alto and other familiar technology for enterprises. Until Google Cloud can catch up in the enterprise security area I don't think they will be a good enterprise cloud option.
Why would anyone write something as stupid as you did?
Yeah, definitely need to get rid of a few editors.....
Slowly and steadily we are moving away from the internet and into the Googlenet... Or so it feels anyway, and with each step a little bit of freedom seems to disappear as more and more tracking comes in.
One thing I don't know if Google could match is the legacy support. Microsoft wants everyone off on-premises Windows and onto Azure badly and is investing a lot of money to do it. I come from a very legacy industry with lots of ancient Windows software, and Microsoft's attitude has been "bring it in, refactor it and move it to cheaper PaaS stuff if/when you can." They're offering lots of help too -- as soon as they saw companies were OK with Office 365 permanent revenue lock-in, the strategy is now to get everyone's workload in their cloud and charge perpetually.
AWS and Google in my experience seem to be much more focused on the "cloud only, mobile only, desktops are for LUDDITES, apps!" crowd. And it makes sense -- if you're a startup and have no identity management needs, no ties to Active Directory or an on-premises infrastructure, then why not throw out the rulebook and develop from scratch? How many thousands of web frameworks are out there? I'm sure AWS and Google have a pre-built template for all of them. AWS has virtual machines, and they even do a sorta-DaaS service. But you can tell their heart's not really in it...yeah sure, here's some VMs to run your Luddite stuff but check out all these cool new microservices! Microsoft's approach so far has been that they have all the cutting edge stuff, but are willing to invest the time and infrastructure money to host IaaS stuff as first-class citizens.
One thing I think Microsoft could step their game up on is catering to "IT Pros" which is their name for non-developers. Yes, we're all going to be DevOps ninjas or whatever the hipsters are calling us, but IT guys need to come up to speed fast on this stuff, and fill in the gaps in their knowledge. I've been doing this like crazy over the last year -- if you're not a full-time web developer the documentation is a little opaque at first until you get some backstory.
> how does Google buying Windows licenses pose a threat to Microsoft?
Windows licenses in bulk are what, about $10, once? Versus $2,400 / year for cloud hosting a medium sized instance.
> Wouldn't it be a bigger threat/opportunity to assist companies move away from the Microsoft environment?
It's much easier to sell Google database services, machine learning, DNS, and all the other non-Microsoft Google stuff to companies hosted in Google's cloud. To help companies transition away from Microsoft, Google first needs to allow them to bring their environment to Google. Once it's on Google's cloud platform, it makes more sense for the company's *next* database server to be one of the many databases offered by Google rather than defaulting to MS SQL.
Google's cloud has some of the same security services that are popular on Amazon, and others can be deployed whenever more customers want them.
As an example, several security services that you can buy through Amazon are actually provided by a security company called Alert Logic. Alert Logic announced support for Google Cloud in 2014:
https://www.alertlogic.com/pre...
You can bet that as Google Cloud manages to get more market share, companies like Alert Logic are ready to deploy more services to Google Cloud. They have stuff in the pipeline, awaiting completion whenever their customers ask for Google support.
Google can compete with Microsoft in the Windows Enterprise space in one area - price. And even that will be difficult due to licensing costs. They will not be able to compete in capabilities or quality. Say what you want about Microsoft, they are pretty good technically when it comes to Windows. The most Google can do in this space is drive MS's prices down, but I hardly see how that's good for Google.
Linux? Sure, I'd expect Google to eat Microsoft's lunch.
Tech stories seem to average less than a hundred comments, while political articles rack up several hundred.
Anybody know a site where there's a good vim vs emacs war going on?