Azure Like It

Let’s face it, when you think “Operating Systems” you think Microsoft.  And if you don’t think Microsoft, you’re obviously a commie mutant traitor, and you should report to the nearest confession and execution booth to confess your treason to Friend Computer. 

Microsoft has announced their cloud computing OS – officially.

InfoWorld has a good article up about the “scalable hosting environment.”  As you would expect, it’s a combination of a way to host SAAS apps on Microsoft’s datacenters, as well as a software developer platform for the .Net Framework, SharePoint, etc.  The interesting thing is Live Services which:

“according to [Chief Software Architect Ray] Ozzie, will extend Azure services “outward” to connect with locally running Microsoft software. Using this rich environment, developers will be able to build and deploy Web applications and services running on Microsoft’s worldwide infrastructure of datacenters.”

Not to be critical, but isn’t the whole point of SAAS that you can connect to the software without having any particular operating system or client besides a standards-compliant Web browser?  Accessibility can be seen as a performance problem – if the application cannot be accessed from 5% of the platforms that users would like to access it on (iPhones, Macs, Unixes of all flavors, varieties, and funky names,) is that really functionally different than 5% downtime?  Or another way – functionally different from a “get your butt to a computer that it actually will work with” human latency delay?

But let’s talk about less “forest”, and more “trees” measure of performance.  We don’t have any hard numbers yet – only anecdotes. 

Another attendee, Suhas Mallya, data architect at Aztecsoft, said Azure “looks impressive.”

“First of all, it builds on something that people are already familiar with,” the Windows platform, said Mallya.

He did add it was a little too early to determine whether Microsoft can succeed with Azure. “I found the demos a little slow,” Mallya said.

To be fair, since the software has been officially announced only recently, “a little slow” can be sped up by the final release date.

Considering this announcement comes at the same time as the release of the pre-beta code for the more traditional desktop operating system, Windows 7, the question becomes whether Microsoft will try to keep its desktop OS dominance until the desktop OS market is irrelevant or if they’re willing to branch out into the brave new world. 

Most likely, they’ll do both and see which one becomes the bigger success.

[Ed. Note: Although I really couldn’t work it into the body of the blog post without hammering it in, I just wanted to point out the title, “Azure like it” isn’t just a mediocre pun.  Azure happens to be the tincture associated with the heavenly body of Jupiter, whose largest moon is Ganymede, and “Ganymede” is the pseudonym taken by Rosalind in Shakespeare’s “As You Like it.”

Well, I thought it was interesting…]