

Microsoft Officially Launches Azure Machine Learning Platform - claytheboss
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/microsoft-officially-launches-azure-machine-learning-big-data-platform/

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sputknick
I see this as an uphill battle for MS. Everything about Machine Learning is
easy to do on Mac and Linux, so everything for Machine Learning is currently
done on those OSes. You can use ML products on Windows right now, but its been
so difficult that no one bothered to. When the last Surface Pro came out I
looked into switching, after about an hour of research I decided "Nope, nope,
nope that looks too painful for too little benefit".

OTOH, MS definitely needed to do this to hopefully win some people like me
over, in order to continue to gain ground on Amazon in Cloud usage, IBM in ML
software, and Apple in OS and hardware. I'm also intrigued by their
marketplace, if I can use this as an app store to sell my services, I might be
interested.

Best of luck to you MS, you have a challenge ahead of you in this space, but
you seem to be firing on all cylinders lately!

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randomfool
Azure has no need to push Windows, they do not make any more money for Windows
VMs over Linux.

This is much more about establishing Azure as an ML platform than Windows.

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tzm
The author failed to include the link. Here it is:
[http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/machine-
learning/](http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/machine-learning/)

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slagfart
Great usability, but it only integrates happily with other Microsoft cloud
services. You can't read from BigQuery or Amazon RDS, for example - only the
Microsoft equivalents. It's a deeply disappointing decision, and already rules
it out for a use case in our firm.

Microsoft shouldn't forget how GM was driven to bankruptcy at least partially
by its inhouse part sourcing policy. If there's a weak link in the Microsoft
cloud offering, users will simply hold out for Amazon's equivalent platform,
which is undoubtedly a matter of time.

You're a challenger in the arena, so don't act like an entrenched incumbent.

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Cakez0r
All signs point towards Microsoft opening up their platforms rather than
locking people in. I expect that in this case, it's more to do with the
overhead of piping data in to and out of their data centers (I.E. paying for
bandwidth) as opposed to getting bandwidth for free by having the data
colocated with their ML servers.

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slagfart
Fair call on MS, but this allows for free downloading of datasets from public
URLs. Surely that's more expensive than downloading from the other cloud
platforms, given that you've got a (probably?) higher likelihood of USA-based
hosting when pulling from AWS/Google.

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tekelsey
What's needed is for Microsoft to make Azure machine learning accessible to a
wider audience, via visualization tools with the level of ease of use like
Tableau.

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altano
That is what this product is. (I work on this team, by the way)

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tekelsey
Sweet! Thanks for bringing that forward. If you ever make an academic edition
that students could play with, please let me know!
[http://linkedin.com/in/tekelsey](http://linkedin.com/in/tekelsey)

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altano
The product is free to use with certain limits. If some of the limits are too
restrictive for students, we should chat.

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jacob-s-son
I'd prefer them improving UI allowing such simple things in browser as root
shell to Linux VM. Otherwise you can kill hour or two trying to reset password
that ex-colleague forgot to pass you. Sometimes you can't do it at all,
without contacting support .....

