The odd contradiction is that Microsoft is indeed about developers3, but a lot of those developers are finding it hard to envision a cloud world.

Microsoft mixes (pun intended) a dev message where Office apps on the desktop are still as valid as Mesh or anything else from the ‘Ray Camp’. These guys aren’t the early adopters anymore and more the internal IT shop pragmatists.

You’ll more likely find Ruby/Python/Hadoop devs as the ones at the startups with the vision, and they won’t be picking Azure despite any competitive advantage of libraries/graph helpers.

I’d say there is a fair chance of Azure stalling and be hit by the two fronts of the cost conscious heading for Amazon and the inventors heading to Google Apps.

Interesting times.

The odd contradiction is that Microsoft is indeed about developers3, but a lot of those developers are finding it hard to envision a cloud world.

Microsoft mixes (pun intended) a dev message where Office apps on the desktop are still as valid as Mesh or anything else from the ‘Ray Camp’. These guys aren’t the early adopters anymore and more the internal IT shop pragmatists.

You’ll more likely find Ruby/Python/Hadoop devs as the ones at the startups with the vision, and they won’t be picking Azure despite any competitive advantage of libraries/graph helpers.

I’d say there is a fair chance of Azure stalling and be hit by the two fronts of the cost conscious heading for Amazon and the inventors heading to Google Apps.

Interesting times.

However, that’s trivial in comparison to the bigger picture. The most intriguing idea in this post is a *real* Live Search…that’s a game changer.

However, that’s trivial in comparison to the bigger picture. The most intriguing idea in this post is a *real* Live Search…that’s a game changer.

Question on this bit:

“..who needs a game changer in search, social search in realtime may prove sufficiently attractive at a time when a Twitter-esque service could be slapped into Azure with a minimum of effort.”

Surely Microsoft is the platform vendor for Azure, and they won’t get any additional kudo/respect/share just because someone comes along and writes a social realtime search app that happens to just run on the platform Azure?

Azure is just a run-time that is interesting but hard to quantify until they actually release a pricing model. Put another way, there are cool apps on S2/EC2 but people don’t see those as game changers for Amazon?

Question on this bit:

“..who needs a game changer in search, social search in realtime may prove sufficiently attractive at a time when a Twitter-esque service could be slapped into Azure with a minimum of effort.”

Surely Microsoft is the platform vendor for Azure, and they won’t get any additional kudo/respect/share just because someone comes along and writes a social realtime search app that happens to just run on the platform Azure?

Azure is just a run-time that is interesting but hard to quantify until they actually release a pricing model. Put another way, there are cool apps on S2/EC2 but people don’t see those as game changers for Amazon?