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Comment by pesenti | Hacker News Reader

Watson APIs will be accessible - without the need for an application - as part of BlueMix (https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ - the IBM PaaS/Heroku) in a couple of weeks. Stay posted!

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That is great! I just signed up with my existing IBM ID. I am enjoying using IBM Watson right now on a customer project, and being able to experiment and learn on my own will both help the effort to help my customer and perhaps use IBM Watson for personal projects. BTW, I like your dev page, with starter kits for multiple languages and frameworks.

BlueMix is actually pretty exciting to me; I think IBM has finally stepped up as a competitor in the "cloud" ecosystem where Microsoft has really failed.

uhh, failed according to what?

I personally have seen very few success stories that involved Azure. The messaging coming through to the public is that Azure is buggy and unreliable. I can recall seeing a couple of major downtime incidents ([1] at least) in the last six months, and a significant number of major ones over the last few years (certificate renewal issues, leap day issues, etc [2][3][4]).

I wouldn't choose Azure myself, and I would actively recommend against choosing it to others from what I have seen (unless you are building a solution on .NET/Windows, perhaps). I can't imagine that I'm alone.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-azure-virtual-machine-cloud-...

[2] http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2013/02/24/windows-azure-ser...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5266947

[4] http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/leap-day-glitch-caus...

It's strange to see FUD deployed against Microsoft for once!

"Really failed"? According to Forbes in July of this year[0], Microsoft is second only to Amazon in the cloud market, and gaining. I'm not sure how that counts as a failure, except in the sense that Microsoft makes a popular whipping boy.

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/07/28/amazon-i...

I suspect (but don't have confirmation) that this includes Microsoft's SaaS products like Exchange Online/O365, which are very successful.

I get the impression that Azure specifically as PaaS/IaaS, OTOH, is quite a bit less so. At least compared to AWS.

That sounds great. I'll stay tuned.

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