4 ms·

If this works, Microsoft is going to hit a long-term retention jackpot. Low-code ecosystems are sticky and excel in ARR as their model is usually consumption ba

by omk 5y ago

If this works, Microsoft is going to hit a long-term retention jackpot. Low-code ecosystems are sticky and excel in ARR as their model is usually consumption based. Moving away costs companies millions. Every employee is automating their work on this platform. I working with a consulting firm and one of our customers (+50,000 employees) has onboarded power-platform for every individual to automate their work. If ever a change is proposed, the change management team is going to shoot this down or will be forced to create a 5 year migration plan.

akudha 5y ago
I think it will work, especially if Microsoft can also build self hosted version of some of these tools. There is a huge market for such tools (look at how much attention self hosted Airtable alternatives are getting). Between self/cloud hosted versions, their sales machine and deep integrations, Microsoft has a huge advantage over Google and Amazon.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  At BUILD this year Microsoft announced Azure Arc which runs on any Kubernetes cluster (including ones you spin up on AWS, GCP, or a laptop on a desk somewhere) and supports running a surprising number of Azure services already (Azure App Services, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, and supposedly growing). Administration can happen in the regular Azure Portal and it just looks like you are deploying to a custom datacenter region in the Portal. It's really slick. It's also pretty obvious that many of the services they've focused on at first are some of the underlying foundations of their Low Code efforts, so I would be surprised if Power Apps and Power BI also eventually wind up on that list of Azure Arc supported. Azure Arc seems like a really interesting "compromise" on "self-hosted" (depending of course, on which reasons you have to need "self-hosting"). (Azure also has Azure Stack which is the entirely self-hosted datacenter version too. I don't think that yet supports these Low Code tools yet either, but it's probably even closer to having the foundations for that in place.)
jerf 5y ago
I don't know if they're pursuing this, but Microsoft also has the opportunity to create low-code solutions that more gracefully transition into conventional solutions, because unlike a pure-low-code play, that doesn't have to mean they are losing a customer. They aren't incentivized to lock you in to low code as long as one way or another you pay Microsoft on the way out, too, via either being in the conventional Microsoft developer ecosystem or being on Azure. Given that they seems to be acquiring they way into this market, I'm sure it's nowhere near this integrated yet, but could you imagine being able to take any individual component of the system, or the system as a whole, and getting a "Click Here to create a Visual Studio Project" that completely replicates the low-code solution into Visual Studio, ready and waiting for you to start modifying it? Probably with some sort of automatic "Click Here to Deploy Your Changes Into Azure"?
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  That's very much Microsoft's goal here. It's a lot of why they started pushing everyone to stop calling it "No Code" and moved to the name "Low Code". At BUILD they released some of the first big VS Code plugins for some of the Low Code systems. (Power Apps is represented mostly as a lot of YAML files, if you were curious.) Most of the Low Code systems already use Azure CI/CD and git under the hood and editing Low Code projects in VS Code and VS seems easy enough for "conventional" developers.
ajcp 5y ago
Couldn't agree more. By providing tools that allow you to "reach in" to every part of their ecosystem, from their OS to their productivity suites to their cloud offerings, they're creating a very comfy lock-in that would be hard to justify your way out of.

by omk 5y ago

akudha 5y ago

I think it will work, especially if Microsoft can also build self hosted version of some of these tools. There is a huge market for such tools (look at how much attention self hosted Airtable alternatives are getting). Between self/cloud hosted versions, their sales machine and deep integrations, Microsoft has a huge advantage over Google and Amazon.

WorldMaker 5y ago
At BUILD this year Microsoft announced Azure Arc which runs on any Kubernetes cluster (including ones you spin up on AWS, GCP, or a laptop on a desk somewhere) and supports running a surprising number of Azure services already (Azure App Services, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, and supposedly growing). Administration can happen in the regular Azure Portal and it just looks like you are deploying to a custom datacenter region in the Portal. It's really slick. It's also pretty obvious that many of the services they've focused on at first are some of the underlying foundations of their Low Code efforts, so I would be surprised if Power Apps and Power BI also eventually wind up on that list of Azure Arc supported. Azure Arc seems like a really interesting "compromise" on "self-hosted" (depending of course, on which reasons you have to need "self-hosting"). (Azure also has Azure Stack which is the entirely self-hosted datacenter version too. I don't think that yet supports these Low Code tools yet either, but it's probably even closer to having the foundations for that in place.)

jerf 5y ago

I don't know if they're pursuing this, but Microsoft also has the opportunity to create low-code solutions that more gracefully transition into conventional solutions, because unlike a pure-low-code play, that doesn't have to mean they are losing a customer. They aren't incentivized to lock you in to low code as long as one way or another you pay Microsoft on the way out, too, via either being in the conventional Microsoft developer ecosystem or being on Azure. Given that they seems to be acquiring they way into this market, I'm sure it's nowhere near this integrated yet, but could you imagine being able to take any individual component of the system, or the system as a whole, and getting a "Click Here to create a Visual Studio Project" that completely replicates the low-code solution into Visual Studio, ready and waiting for you to start modifying it? Probably with some sort of automatic "Click Here to Deploy Your Changes Into Azure"?

WorldMaker 5y ago
That's very much Microsoft's goal here. It's a lot of why they started pushing everyone to stop calling it "No Code" and moved to the name "Low Code". At BUILD they released some of the first big VS Code plugins for some of the Low Code systems. (Power Apps is represented mostly as a lot of YAML files, if you were curious.) Most of the Low Code systems already use Azure CI/CD and git under the hood and editing Low Code projects in VS Code and VS seems easy enough for "conventional" developers.

ajcp 5y ago

Couldn't agree more. By providing tools that allow you to "reach in" to every part of their ecosystem, from their OS to their productivity suites to their cloud offerings, they're creating a very comfy lock-in that would be hard to justify your way out of.