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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't seem like a good PR move for Azure in terms of enterprise sales. One of the big selling points of AWS is that they support everything pretty much forever. Azure has now made it clear that they can and will shutdown services with relatively short notice.

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> Azure has now made it clear that they can and will shutdown services with relatively short notice.

This isn't a new thing - there's an entire Twitter feed dedicated to things Azure discontinues: https://twitter.com/azureendoflife

Enterprise doesn’t worry too much about changes or shutdowns. We worry about them when they happen quickly, surprisingly or without plans for how we move forward.

I’d be pretty happy if our legacy Mainframe systems got shut down, with a decent plan for how our suppliers would move forward to other technologies. As it stands there are only two national companies left who can handle mainframes in my country, so there isn’t much of a bidding war when we put systems into procurement processes, and it makes things really expensive over time.

I hope most enterprises entered the cloud with a mindset not to get locked in. I know we did, and in that setup, Microsoft can move forward as they see fit as long as they give us time to move on.

Not that I think any enterprise organisations were really using Azure Blockchain, I still haven’t seen a single reason to use Blockchain. Even if you live in a corrupt country, where decentralised trust might make sense, you still need an authority to back it up. This is why Bitcoin works for crime, they enforce it.

> Microsoft's product page for Azure BaaS lists GE, J.P. Morgan, Singapore Airlines, Starbucks and Xbox as customers.

The article says that these enterprises are using it

Uhh ... that means they did a pilot with it back when BaaS started out.

50 bucks says none of them actively use Azure Blockchain for anything meaningful in their organization.

And Consensys is MSFT's preferred BaaS ISV these days.

Source: work at MSFT Partner, occasionally co-discuss BaaS with clients.

I've become extremely jaded to the logo gallery for these obvious secondary/tertiary B2B SaaS products in an organization. The logo for a pilot or some other freebie is kind of overdone now. Often this pilot ends up hitting the real org then crashing and burning because these secondary/tertiary pet projects are often never given the chance to be mature enough for their actual customer base before trying to solicit customers. These services finally hit a security person or something else and just gets the axe because they are just not even close to ready. If I'm playing technical customer I'm reaching out to you because I need what you have rather than you soliciting me. Most businesses are not so complex that it's obvious if a B2B SaaS is an essential service or some weird add-on trendy thing they are trying on for size so it sticks out like a sore thumb.

> We worry about them when they happen quickly, surprisingly or without plans for how we move forward.

This change has a 4 month notice period and the plan to move forward from MS seems to be literally "you should switch to something else." So this change doesn't seem to tick any of the boxes you mentioned.

I am sure they thought about the "PR" consequences of shutting this service down. My guess is the number of users are comparatively so low that it doesn't really matter. I doubt any of their major enterprise customers were using it.

That's not PR impact, that's material impact. The PR impact is not on the current users of the service but on all future potential users of Azure. Like every GCP thread being filled with doom and gloom about Google killing services from people who have never used GCP.

AWS does it too. See the S3 path-style deprecation plans which saw a lot of customer pushback. [1]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-path-deprecation-...

Uh is shutting down in September short notice?

Regardless I looked into the internals/source code for it (I work there) - and it seems to be cold storage for the workbench and not blockchain support as a whole.

Right now it makes more sense to use ConsenSys or manage your own nodes on Azure not pay for a tool.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/blockchain/service/mi...

>Uh is shutting down in September short notice?

For a large company where it might take them 2+ months to just get approval for a new project or a significant project change, yes. I once spent 6 months in meetings to get a single column added to a database for a project we were doing and that was a semi-tech company.

This was a Preview service. It was not being marketed as a production ready product.

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