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!"

Comments

Re:Obvious really

[Austerity Empowers]

They supposedly did a similar thing to a former employer, wherein former employer was bound by contract not to discuss the project, but there was some desire by MS to leak it. So every employee was invited to examine this project, hoping someone would leak it.

It backfired, it was so disinteresting that no one cared enough to leak it, so they had to find some other way. When the project was finally announced, absolutely no one was interested in it.

Re: Microsoft is bragging about CS 50?

[Nidi62]

I started the CS50 course on edX, and I find it a good intro for someone whose entire experience with coding and programming is nothing more than discussions here on Slashdot. Had never even written something as simple as a "hello, world" program. Malan actually seems to be a decent lecturer, and it's giving me at least a strong enough base that I can go on and self-learn some more skills to help forward my career. Of course, I was a liberal arts major, but my graduate degree was in a semi quantitative field.