5 ms·

Ballmer says Microsoft intends to become industry leader in cloud computing

21 points by antigua 16y ago

eel 16y ago
Somewhere in their cloud computing strategy must be to attempt to sue SalesForce.com out of business for software patent infringement.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- awa 16y ago
  like it was in Apple's iPhone strategy to sue HTC? Microsoft gets sued for millions of dollars every year over patents and it makes sense for them to use the laws in their favor from time to time to make some of that money back.
- eel 16y ago
  No? Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_sues_salesforce_for_patent_infringement_1.php 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.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    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.
riffic 16y ago
lol.
nphase 16y ago
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"
barmstrong 16y ago
10 years too late
- maigret 16y ago
  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.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    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.
    - WorkerBee 16y ago
      I'm still not seeing "10 years late".
    - krf 16y ago
      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.
jacson 16y ago
Is this effort based on same winning strategy as Kin?
- niyazpk 16y ago
  "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.
- stretchwithme 16y ago
  yeah the Kin actually contains a rack of servers
chrismealy 16y ago
There was a time when FUD like that would scare people off. That time is long gone.
mkramlich 16y ago
yeah they'll just bundle a cloud with Windows and give it away for free. wait a minute...
epynonymous 16y ago
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?
- fleitz 16y ago
  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"
  - epynonymous 16y ago
    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.
- c1sc0 16y ago
  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.
frankwiles 16y ago
Just like they are the leaders in operating systems, mobile devices, search engines, development environments and browsers sigh
- stretchwithme 16y ago
  they're leaders in leading
snissn 16y ago
what's the size of the market that they are targeting?
stretchwithme 16y ago
you're going to become the industry leader in xyz? ah, ok.
sadapsi 16y ago
you gotta admire them they stuck behind Bing and its decent
warmfuzzykitten 16y ago
Is there anything that big idiot doesn't say? Actually, I hope he is CEO of Microsoft until no one recognizes the name.
britman 16y ago
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.
- WorkerBee 16y ago
  Yep. The headline is absolutely no surprise considering how much development and promotion effort is going into Azure.
- aufreak3 16y ago
  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.
- hga 16y ago
  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?

21 points by antigua 16y ago

eel 16y ago

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

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
awa 16y ago
like it was in Apple's iPhone strategy to sue HTC? Microsoft gets sued for millions of dollars every year over patents and it makes sense for them to use the laws in their favor from time to time to make some of that money back.
eel 16y ago
No? Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_sues_salesforce_for_patent_infringement_1.php 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.
- bad_user 16y ago
  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.

riffic 16y ago

lol.

nphase 16y ago

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"

barmstrong 16y ago

10 years too late

maigret 16y ago
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.
- bad_user 16y ago
  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.
  - WorkerBee 16y ago
    I'm still not seeing "10 years late".
  - krf 16y ago
    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.

jacson 16y ago

Is this effort based on same winning strategy as Kin?

niyazpk 16y ago
"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.
stretchwithme 16y ago
yeah the Kin actually contains a rack of servers

chrismealy 16y ago

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

mkramlich 16y ago

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

epynonymous 16y ago

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?

fleitz 16y ago
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"
- epynonymous 16y ago
  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.
c1sc0 16y ago
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.

frankwiles 16y ago

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

stretchwithme 16y ago
they're leaders in leading

snissn 16y ago

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

stretchwithme 16y ago

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

sadapsi 16y ago

you gotta admire them they stuck behind Bing and its decent

warmfuzzykitten 16y ago

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

britman 16y ago

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.

WorkerBee 16y ago
Yep. The headline is absolutely no surprise considering how much development and promotion effort is going into Azure.
aufreak3 16y ago
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.
hga 16y ago
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?