Ballmer says Microsoft intends to become industry leader in cloud computing | Hacker News Reader

Ballmer says Microsoft intends to become industry leader in cloud computing

washingtonpost.com

21 pointsantigua28 comments

Open articleView on HN

My favorite line here: "If you don't want to move to the cloud, we're not your folks"

Other gems from Ballmer:

"Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards."

"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."

My personal favorite: "Vista is faster than XP"

Everyone is pretty quick to criticise Ballmer and Microsoft and while he does spout a lot of nonsense has anybody actually evaluated Microsoft's cloud platform....from the comments I would say no.

I have and I have to say it's an excellent platform, it has a good feature set, competitive pricing (matches EC2) and they're doing tonnes of work to it and throwing a lot of cash at it. It's not tied to the .Net framework(you can run php, Java, RoR etc etc on it).

Interestingly they also announced Windows Azure appliance yesterday at WPC10 which is the first proper effort to solve to private cloud problem and having spoken to businesses looking at our product this is definitely an issue for B2B SaaS applications.

I just don't understand the immediate disregard for anything Microsoft does, yes IE has been sh*t however it's foolish to write off every new MSFT offering as the "next IE" without understanding what it is offering.

Yep. The headline is absolutely no surprise considering how much development and promotion effort is going into Azure.

You're right that they could actually make an impact.

Now with F# and clojure available as dev languages on .net (soon, if not now), maybe even the "cool kids" will find it fun. Cheering google over msft has been fun, but what we're really cheering for is choice. You don't want only one player in the cloud space.

Further, if they can offer DirectCompute in azure, that'll be a huge differentiator that'll attract the processing intensive apps.

How much effort will Microsoft have to go to for people to not assume it's inextricably tied to .NET?

Would they do that anyway, since it's implicitly saying there are better things than it?

There was a time when FUD like that would scare people off. That time is long gone.

Just like they are the leaders in operating systems, mobile devices, search engines, development environments and browsers sigh

they're leaders in leading

Is there anything that big idiot doesn't say? Actually, I hope he is CEO of Microsoft until no one recognizes the name.

the whole premise of microsoft cloud technologies is windows, windows virtualization, and .net. from what i understand things like lamp, ruby on rails, and so forth reign supreme in this industry. is ballmer on crack?

The issue is primarily licensing, .NET is not ASP. It's actually a very good platform for development. The problem however is cost. Ballmer is very much not on crack because the same guys who buy Visual Studio will be willing to pay MS's price for cloud computing.

Yes, RoR and LAMP reign supreme on the cloud right now because most of the cloud toolsets and tool chains are geared towards RoR and LAMP. The cloud is very inaccessible to .NET developers of which there are a lot and they are employed by companies with large budgets who can afford such things.

When Ballmer gets the "Deploy to Windows Azure" button working in Visual Studio he will be on a gold mine. Especially since a lot of the people who will be clicking that button write horribly inefficient code. Instead of knowing their code is crap because the application is god awfully slow it will instead just ring in lots of CPU and IO cycles which result in big bills. The result will be "thats just how much an applications costs" instead of "write better code"

good points. i think cloud is a broad set of technologies in which operating system, database, web server, apis, etc play a part. msft could make some inroads with these as services considering their past record for shrink wrap software. but for ballmer to say that they will dominate the cloud, that's a bit of a stretch imho.

i feel that msft is trying to play the incompatibility card again where if they make things easier to develop in their set of cloud languages and technologies, it'll pull more developers and (unfortunately) bring us back into the days of internet explorer hell once more. for me, if i'm trying to build up a highly scalable web application, if it takes less time to write in msft jargon then perhaps lamp/ror becomes less attractive, but i haven't seen the day yet.

Don't underestimate the gobloads of legacy apps based on microsoft tech that are still running in the enterprise. There are a lot of developers out there with a massive investment in MSFT tools & knowledge. Giving enterprises a chance to run those legacy apps in the cloud is a viable strategy. Sure, it's nothing for the 'cool kids', but why should MSFT care if money can be made? But yeah, 'largest cloud computing provider' they will never be.

Is this effort based on same winning strategy as Kin?

"You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do"

May be Ballmer should stop trying to act cool and confident. His PR appearances are not helping them in PR.

Microsoft may be too large to fail in many verticals, but mobile and web are definitely not their strong points.

yeah the Kin actually contains a rack of servers

Somewhere in their cloud computing strategy must be to attempt to sue SalesForce.com out of business for software patent infringement.

No?

Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_sues_salesfor...

It's not even typical Microsoft behavior. From the article above:

Although the frequent target of such suits, the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft itself has only filed patent infringement suits four times in its history.

That makes me think that Microsoft is taking cloud computing very seriously, as Ballmer alludes to, and I would include going out of their way to seek injunctions against one of the largest players in cloud computing.

They may have filled patent infringement suits only four times until now ... but they've threatened companies far more than that.

They aren't stupid ... patent infringement suits can get their patents overthrown. You can win much more by spreading FUD.

10 years too late

What motivates you to say that? The term "cloud" itself is not that old. I understand some of the tech underlying was already here 10 years ago, but the combination of these to what we call the cloud wasn't - it's even still being built.

I'm not the parent, but let me shed some light on that.

I've been using Amazon's services ... EC2, S3 and RDS, and now trying out the Elastic MapReduce.

These services simply rock my world, and the prices are competitive enough that third-parties started building and selling their own infrastructure on top of Amazon's services ... like Heroku, MongoHQ, AppCloud or Stax. And all of them have brainless deployment and competitive prices.

Short story ... Amazon's services are awesome, and both Google and Microsoft are late in the game. The only way they could beat it is through better prices, but other than giving away monthly freebies I'm not sure how they could do that.

I'm still not seeing "10 years late".

One way to beat Amazon is to make cloud development easier. I think they will do that. IMHO, Microsoft does make good development environments. People will pay for ease of use.

Another way is for Microsoft to do a great job of selling the cloud to its enormous client and developer base. I think they can do that. I suspect, but don't know, that most corporations would be happier with Microsoft behind their cloud than Amazon. A lot of corporations will have 10+ year relationships with Microsoft and/or its resellers, certified developers, etc. Amazon to them is an online store.

I think Microsoft has a great chance.

yeah they'll just bundle a cloud with Windows and give it away for free. wait a minute...

what's the size of the market that they are targeting?

you're going to become the industry leader in xyz? ah, ok.

lol.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com