Microsoft has come a long way in embracing the cloud, perhaps because it had to.
There is the IaaS/PaaS/STaaS cloud, now dominated by Amazon Web Services both by monetary momentum and a long list of competitors and AWS-compatible ecosystems. Varying organizations also offer a long and interesting list of competitive services, a la carte or in various packages and formats, for pricing that varies with El Niño cycles.
And then there is Microsoft’s Azure.
Azure has been emblematic of an enormous change for Microsoft, including the departure of Steve Ballmer, and the rise of forced-heterogeneity at Microsoft. Headlines of Linux compatibility and releasing their own software assets as open source would have been an anathema just five years ago. Chairs would have been thrown; secret PR campaigns would have been foisted, proxy legal battles would have been launched—a ship of lawyers to castigate and revile the commie heathen FOSS Folk.
That didn’t work.
This is a different Microsoft, but no less charged with shareholder return, and using their assets to dominate markets where they reap harvests. Microsoft must play in the cloud, having lost smartphones and having paid huge prices to become somewhat tablet-ish.
The Azure Stack is something that Microsoft architects have dreamt about for several years, if only “announced” roughly a year ago. Azure took a wicked-long time to arrive not because of sloth. Rather, Microsoft had five very serious problems working against it.
Problem one was a highly constrained licensing model, along with immense relationships between server licenses, cores in the server, CALs, and various constraining factors that only an Oracle salesperson could love or appreciate for its majestic revenue model and lack of understandability. The model was built for the 1990s, when the cloud was once called “service bureau” and wasn’t much competition in the burgeoning, pre-VM era.
Problem two was breaking the psychological chain of: Not Invented Here, e.g. embracing other products that might actually exist and products that might be, competitively speaking, diametrically opposed to Microsoft’s client domination and revenue models. Microsoft learned a little from Apple’s direct-to-consumer marketing and the affinity and (yes, maybe) love that it can purchase for client stickiness.
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SOURCE: Network World
Tom Henderson
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