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Why Doesn't Harvard Want To Talk About Its Mystery Microsoft Azure Project? (geekwire.com)
theodp writes: GeekWire's Tom Krazit reports, "Microsoft Azure appears to have scored a high-profile customer: Harvard University's prestigious CS50 computer science class, not that anybody wants to talk about it." A deleted-today-but-still-cached Microsoft Technical Case Study on the software giant's GitHub account touts the success of a recent DevOps collaboration effort between Microsoft's Azure team and an unnamed "major U.S. research university." "This U.S. university is world-class," explains the case study, "well known for its research and its alumni. For now, they would prefer to remain anonymous, so this document will refer to them as 'the university' (the case study web page, however, is a not-so-anonymous 'CS50.html')." Like many IT projects, there seems to be a disconnect between the software vendor and the client. "The project we defined and delivered was exactly what they were looking for," boasts the case study's three Microsoft authors, who add that "full deployment and migration will wait until summer." Contacted for comment by GeekWire, however, Harvard CS professor extraordinaire David Malan seemed less committed to the relationship. "We're actually still on AWS," Malan wrote, "though most every summer we do tend to re-evaluate our apps' architecture for the coming year, with AWS, Azure, Google, et al. always among the candidates. So no plans yet, but happy to reach out toward summer's end if we've made any decisions!"
spoiler alert. it will be something dumb.
Obvious really - when a vendor uses a client for advertising purposes without warning it puts extra unwanted pressure on the client.
That's why ethical companies don't do that sort of thing to their customers.
It wasn't that Harvard doesn't want to talk about it, but that nobody wants to listen. Nobody is curious about this and nobody cares.
We'll get on that right after doing it to the trailer park you live in first.
This is a simple case of name-dropping. CS 50 is a beginner level course. Here is the syllabus:
http://docs.cs50.net/2016/fall/syllabus/cs50.html
Is Microsoft going to start bragging about every prestigious institution that uses Blackboard too?
You don't talk about Mystery Project. (You know the rest ...)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
A deal like that makes perfect sense for both sides, like a golf equipment manufacturer providing free clubs and fittings to tour pros.
The real question is why, with just a word salad summary, should I give a shit?
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Didn't 10% of their class get caught cheating? Like, last week? And Slashdot reported it?
Please BeauHD, stop being a mod. Quit. You fucking suck.
n/t
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I didn't think it was. Does not have the same reputation as their business, law, medical, economics, and political science departments.
I actually used to work at Microsoft not too long ago. Walking through building 9 in Redmon, where they keep a lot of the lawyers and some educational people, I saw some materials about CS50 at Yale. Maybe this is related?
They have an intro course with the same number there.
Because of an NDA, what else?
The rule about bribes is that there ain't no such thing.
(captcha: "orifice". 'Nuff said)
I always find it extremely amusing that all our thin client users use nothing but Chrome. And this has been going on ever since the server was upgraded from 2003 and the clients were upgraded to Win7 from XP. As far as Azure and linking our info source pipe into Redmond that is a non starter period. It is bad enough that the collaborative document features of MS office all try to hook you into the Microsoft cloud outside of an intranet and all the default settings of out of program search has to be hacked to use something other than IE core.
The reality is that Microsoft is loosing the cloud computing battle badly indeed and boasting of a tenuous cloud computing association with Harvard is a complete and absolute joke. When using Microsoft information storage and search services is not a reality for most of their core business server customers and has never been because the core Microsoft web information services are not up to the task. Their less than adequate information and essentially insecure WWW interface functionality has made Google increasingly more important to most businesses over the years. Azure is a non starter and the features it pushes are largely turned off by most system admins.
Office 360 is a curse to say the least and most business customers are sick and tired of the cloud features of Microsoft being rammed down their throats and this is why Windows 10 is failing miserably as a thin client OS and why WinXP and WIn7 succeeded. Forcing upgrades that push thin clients to the Azure cloud and make it increasingly difficult to change default WWW interface settings is going to cost Microsoft dearly, I know our business which is a large retirement care corporation will not stand for what is happening and will not upgrade to 10 as long as there is an alternative to Azure based web services.
Careful, you may end up having to share that cardboard refrigerator box you live in.
This was a few yrs ago.
Heard about a former employer saying we were going to switch all our IT compute resources over the Azure. I started laughing because we had 20K physical Unix (HP/IBM/Sun/Teradata/etc) boxes running software that does not exist on Intel platforms. We also had 20K physical Windows servers - about half had VMware-whatever on them.
Seems the Microsoft Sales team took the local business guys on a week-long junket to show off everything (and perhaps a few "fun" places outside work. Guess they were impressed, because they made the sale. The next week, IT was told to get in line, because that was how it was going to work. Seems nobody had explained that a computer is not a computer is not a computer. There are different OSes and chip architectures. These are not compatible. No amount of realistic funding or time will change that. We had extremely specialized systems and were already running everything we could on Intel, where it made sense.
So we started making lists of projects/software that wouldn't run on Windows/Intel and pushed that back up the management chain. It was around 60K projects - we were using virtualization already on most of the Unix systems where direct hardware wasn't required.
The Azure deal was killed. Something about impossible claims being made.
For many places, it would certainly be a viable solution. We had already solved many issues that running thousands and thousands of physical and virtual systems would need. We already had lots of extremely well-designed data centers and had the expertise to run them for decades.
An organisation doesn't want to publicly discuss their IT infrastructure? Doesn't want to be involved in free publicity for a giant corporation? What has the world come to.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Because they pronounce it as "Hahzhure" and everyone will laugh at them.
If I started using Azure for something important and expensive, the last thing I'd want to do is to tell anyone about it.
"Hey, we're on a discount right now, so it's okay, but we've started using a cloud provider with a shitty reputation for security. Once the discount period ends, we'll be paying more than we could at any number of competitors".
Doesn't sound too bright to me ;-)
Does Harvard have a secret history as a major force for evil?
I work in a very traditional environment that has just started putting their toes in the water on a few Azure projects. Because I'm the guy on our engineering team who likes learning new stuff, I sort of got tasked with figuring it out and teaching everyone else.
I think the main reason Microsoft is trying to get major educational clients on board is to get people used to Azure as the default deployment method for workloads. A lot of what they're doing makes a lot of sense but requires you to think in a different way to properly manage your stuff. When I was in (non-CS) college in the early 90s and doing tech support as a student job, absolutely everything was Sun hardware and Solaris. Sun used to charge businesses astronomical pricing for their equipment but practically give it away to universities...the idea being that today's CS grads would be tomorrow's IT purchase decision makers. If you teach newbies from scratch how to deploy things to Azure, then that's what they learn and will take to employers. With Azure Stack coming out, and traditional boxed software being a thing of the past from Microsoft, it makes perfect sense to get students on board early before they learn anything else.
I'm certainly not one of those people who thinks every company should jump in with both feet and dump all their physical servers into a cloud provider. There's a balance and for most places that aren't a one-trick phone app based shop, I think that for most places, the balance is still going to tilt towards on-site once the Second Dotcom Bubble pops and the hype goes down. But, Microsoft is clearly going for becoming another mainframe provider with this move to Azure -- they're doing everything in their power to help companies move their workloads, and once they're in they will be collecting revenue forever instead of one-off license fees.
The Azure deal was killed. Something about impossible claims being made.
That shouldn't have been allowed. The company should have been required to move everything to Azure, and for things where that was impossible, those things should have simply been shut down. The company made the choice to buy MS's bullshit, so they should have been required to follow through, even if it killed them. This would have been a great warning for other companies making dumb decisions.
I work for a private software company. We have a lot of customers. We don't use the customer's name without their consent, and this also generally implies that not only the executives sign off on the use, but also the legal department. This might also be part of a sales negotiation, where the publicity of landing a big well known name as a reference account can be worth something in terms of selling into other similar accounts. I know that we get permission for the use of other companies logos on our slides used in sales presentations before we put them up there. These are the exception rather than the rule.
There are companies that do not want the world to know they are a customer of ours under any circumstances, for myriad different reasons. There are others who are perfectly content to be used as a reference account, others prefer that details be obfuscated. Sounds like Harvard was OK with Microsoft providing broad outlines of what they did but didn't want it to be known that it was them.
I'm sure there are plenty of Azure customers who don't want it to be known that they are using Azure. This is probably the default for any Azure customer.
"The reality is that Microsoft is losing the cloud computing battle badly indeed and boasting of a tenuous cloud computing association with Harvard is a complete and absolute joke."
I'm guessing this Slashdot story is a paid advertisement.
It's probably that such a prestigious university doesn't want anyone to know it's using microsoft's crappy cloud for anything that matters
Click to find out and 12 other secrets you might not know about.
So translation: Microsoft managed to bribe someone from the university to have them consider Azure in their annual summer cloud provider re-evaluation