Why Is Microsoft Competing With Backend as a Service Startups?
kinvey.com
kinvey.com
And while I was thinking that, I came to the conclusion I haven't looked at any of their products targeting developpers in almost a decade. Maybe things have changed. But all the stated differences in the linked article seem to suggest, things are not that different. But it's just one article, and you seem very informed, am I wrong, in this assumption? When Microsoft creates a development tool, is the intention to capitalize on me, as a developer (which I would like), or to control what I can capitalize on in the market space? (which is just unacceptable)
Is it not smart, that the majority of developers, tend to always favor independent parties, where we are the core customer. From Heroku, to Github. Neither one has any interest in what platforms we support. They only care about supporting us, so we keep paying them. One could even argue, that most development tools provided by platform vendors, are intrinsically destined to be anti-competitive.
Are we comparing Azure to ALL of the startups in the scene? What about features that one has but others don't. Is there even one service that the "BaaS Players" column completely and accurately describes? I literally don't know, and the article doesn't tell me.
My gut says this is like comparing the USA (or whatever single county) vs. "Europe" and only picking your favorite parts from each country, and shaking your head at the USA for not having all of these positives. In fact, however, no single country in Europe would actually have all those positive points, or even a majority (usually)
Oh, you must not have visited Switzerland. :-) Anyway, I'm the author, I am providing a high level comparison, yes, between Azure and the feature set that is establishing with most BaaS companies. If I've missed anything important I'd love to be corrected.
I actually don't know what you missed, if anything. I came to your article having never heard of any of the players in the BaaS scene (besides Azure). I left with the impression that everyone besides Azure is basically exactly the same thing, running the same technology, and offering the same features. My brain dismissed that as unlikely, or at the least, some wallpapering. In fact, it might not be that unlikely after all.
Of course, I'm not in the market for a BaaS anyway, that's just the impression I was left in as a purely curious reader.
There are two different Azure table-like stores: SQL Azure, which is indeed a relational database, and Azure Tables, which are not. It's only the latter whose schema is dynamic in the sense the author means.
(Although I'm a Microsoft employee, I know nothing about the "Baas" product.)