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Why Doesn't Harvard Want To Talk About Its Mystery Microsoft Azure Project? (geekwire.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the group-therapy dept.

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!"

3 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Obvious really by dbIII · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Microsoft is bragging about CS 50? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

    CS 50 is a beginner level course.

    It is even worse than that. It is a survey course for non-majors. It is a bunch of liberal arts majors taking "Computers for Dummies" in the hope that it may help them get a job when they graduate since they will know Excel.

  3. I don't know. by newcastlejon · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.