What Ray Ozzie Didn't Tell You About Microsoft Azure

I agree completely. Especially if you're at Big Corp X that already has some sort of service agreement with Microsoft. Working with an existing vendor and getting a new service is more cost efficient than signing on with a new vendor for a similar service (in terms of writing up request for proposal, man hours, etc).

It's also a very clever framing the question in a leading way. Let's try framing it in another way:

Let's say you're a business decision maker, and you got yourself on this cloud computing kick. Who would you rather buy your cloud resources from?

1. A company who built its entire business on the high availability of its international network of online transaction engines, 2. A company which has built its business on indexing, and processing one of the biggest data stores in the world, and which has also built and run the world's most popular Internet-based productivity tools. 3. A company whose business relies om shipping a PC operating systems and which also supplies a word processor. "

I'm not saying that my framing is any less biased, just that there is more than one way to view these things.

I've worked at a true bigco (you've used their products) that ran acres of Microsoft desktops. Angostura is correct. Just because bigco mgmt found Windows to be the most suitable desktop for them, doesn't mean they'll use Microsoft products anywhere else.

We used several databases, but none from Microsoft. We used several programming languages, but none from Microsoft. Suggesting either would get you laughed out of the room even quicker than suggesting a free software solution (and in fact, we did use free software for several things like this, which mgmt saw as its fortes).

Managers at bigco want to minimize risk. (We used Windows 2000 until about 2006, i.e., it took a while to trust Microsoft at the one thing we thought they were good at.) When (not if) something goes wrong, they don't want the finger pointed at them. They're risk-averse to an extreme (which drives us programmers nuts), but they're not that stupid -- they know a PC OS is vastly different from a cloud platform. A brand new service from a company not known for this type of service is not minimizing risk.

If they got the itch to try cloud computing, they probably would have started by calling up Oracle.