

Ballmer says Microsoft intends to become industry leader in cloud computing - antigua
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/12/AR2010071205166.html

======
nphase
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"

------
britman
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.

~~~
aufreak3
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.

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

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

~~~
stretchwithme
they're leaders in leading

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

------
epynonymous
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
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
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.

------
jacson
Is this effort based on same winning strategy as Kin?

~~~
niyazpk
"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.

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

~~~
eel
No?

Source:
[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_sues_salesfor...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_sues_salesforce_for_patent_infringement_1.php)

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
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.

------
barmstrong
10 years too late

~~~
maigret
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
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.

~~~
krf
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.

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

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

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

------
riffic
lol.

