At the time of XP, Microsoft had a fierce monopoly in the world and was absolutely dominating.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they started embracing the “ship fast” mentality with the cloud a bit more over the past years, in order to corner the market more quickly (which they did).
Additionally, I can also imagine that the release processes for cloud are fundamentally different than something like an OS. With the cloud, there’s a much larger mentality of releasing often, and it may be difficult to translate rigorous security audits to this workflow.
I think that's because before this whole cloud thing came about, Microsoft already had built the image as an enterprise software vendor. They provided hosted cloud solutions long back, then they invented hybrid solutions like Azure Stack and slowly and carefully eased their clients into Azure.
Also, Microsoft support for enterprise customers is just amazing. They have been deploying their own engineers to support enterprise customers in the past for their hosted clouds.
Cant mention much about security but Microsoft does open fewer lower level Apis compared to Linux. For example, it's impossible to do certain socket-level ops with Windows apis. So, in a sense I guess it makes Windows safer at least historically?
Yes, but the world of software development is radically different now. Microsoft knows that the cloud is where most of their potential for growth is and they think (correctly, in my opinion) that developer goodwill is going to be important in getting more of the cloud market share.
They aren't the biggest player right now, so their main focus is getting people to switch from a different provider (AWS) to Azure. A great way to do that is for the developers to like using Azure more than AWS.
After all, most of Microsoft's "evil years" were when they were on top, not in a distant second place.
I also think that developers have a lot more power in companies, especially smaller and newer companies, than they used.
I’m not sure it’s changed much on the Windows / Office side. There’s definitely a different attitude with Azure. However, it’s hard to tell if that’s a culture change or if it’s just because they are the little guy in the cloud space.
Why do you think that Microsoft has a weak position in the cloud industry? If Microsoft really had a weak Cloud strategy, its competitors wouldn't be resorting to tricks like this.
I don't think anybody offers customers an easier self-hosted-to-cloud-hosted migration strategy than Microsoft. They are offering (or will be offering) all of their server-side products "in the cloud". Using Microsoft's stack, you develop your applications the same way, using the same libraries, and the same protocols, regardless of whether you are deploying to your own server or to Microsoft's. Most of Microsoft's competitors require you to rewrite applications to get them to work on the cloud.
Most of its competitors have very poor desktop integration, whereas Microsoft is integrating support for its cloud hosting directly into its its desktop software (including Windows and Office). For example, Windows 7 has a pretty sophisticated caching and synchronization infrastructure built into it so that desktop applications can work on documents/databases/email in the cloud with minimal latency. Microsoft Office already has built-in support for Sharepoint, which means that it has built-in support for Microsoft's cloud offerings (Office Live and Microsoft Online).
I think Microsoft leveraged their Office lock-in, additionally to luring some users with apps like one-note/one-drive.
I use Azure outside the US from central Europe and the performance of their cloud services is just terrible.
Personally, I don't really like the move to the cloud at all. The whole MS palette of services from the OS to Office doesn't really convince me.
I am surprised the cloud market is actually that small. Especially since classic hosting is just included. And a growth of ~250% compared to last decade? A decade is pretty long...
Our business "jumped" into the cloud because of the reliance on MS office products. It was not done out of love.
And strangely enough, Microsoft is currently the only big three Cloud Vendor which you likely wont be competing against.
If you are doing anything on the Web, you are competing against Google ( and Facebook ). If you are doing Retail, e-commerce, you are competing against Amazon.
Microsoft is trying to turn the Cloud into its new OS before Amazon does it. But from the way things stand this will likely never happen.
So as far as I can tell I have no problem with that strategy at all.
I don't agree with you, but even if I did, Microsoft is probably best positioned to take advantage of such a trend, since they have the most seamless experience going from their cloud products to their hosted products.
Microsoft seems like one of the few companies that can actually succeed with cloud. They have a massive inbuilt market of customers using microsoft server products that they can transition into their cloud, I don't know that there's any other company other than AWS better positioned to do well in that market?
I don't know if I would hold it against any company for not being on par with Microsoft for rolling out a massive cloud service. Microsoft has been designing for massive, globally distributed services for enterprises forever, even before Azure and O365.
Microsoft knows how to ink large deals with enterprises to move them onto their Azure platform and sell them additional products and services. Their cloud, while IMO the UX is inferior to AWS, is an easy sell to large corporations with a large MS footprint already. I expect their revenue to keep growing, but their P/E multiple is a little high IMO.
It’s interesting that Microsoft doesn’t have this type of attitude as well for Azure, as they’re famous for their extreme care around backwards compatibility for Windows as well.
Perhaps it’s because Microsoft is still catching up with Azure, and as such prefers moving fast and occasionally breaking things?
Microsoft got in the game pretty early compared to everyone else (except Amazon of course). I remember even my intern days Ballmer repeating the word "cloud" at every opportunity and thinking "what's the big deal, its just a VPS".
I wouldn’t be surprised if they started embracing the “ship fast” mentality with the cloud a bit more over the past years, in order to corner the market more quickly (which they did).
Additionally, I can also imagine that the release processes for cloud are fundamentally different than something like an OS. With the cloud, there’s a much larger mentality of releasing often, and it may be difficult to translate rigorous security audits to this workflow.
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