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back to article Memo to Microsoft: don't bet against Amazon

The technology world used to be fairly easy to understand. For a time, IBM dominated the back office while Microsoft monopolized the desktop. More recently, Microsoft and Linux split the difference on servers while Oracle bought the known universe to dominate enterprise middleware and applications. But along comes the cloud, …

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  1. Greg Fawcett
    Pint

    And Google's Appengine?

    You might want to add Appengine to the mix. Granted, it is different from most of the others in that it is a totally managed environment, but this means it abstracts the sysadmin as well as the hardware. This allows developers to concentrate on the application, instead of whether they've patched whatever the vulnerability du jour is.

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  2. Chris 3
    Stop

    "Cloudtards"

    I would like to propose a new El Reg term - Cloudtards for people who uncritically hype cloud computing. I'm sick of it.

    I love the sentence in this article: "Already Gartner is projecting 100-per cent adoption of public cloud computing by Global 2000 organizations by 2016". That's fine, but I might as well say that 100% of desktops will be based on open source, based on the fact that Microsoft uses some BSD-licenced code in its TCP/IP stack.

    So 100% might be using it? But for what? Running their public-facing support forums? What proportion of the corse computing resource will be in the cloud? Will my bank be running my credit card transactions on Amazon?

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Oh leave it out

      Our entire infrastructure has now been running on Amazon Web Services for several months and is doing very well for it.

      If you can't work your way beyond 1990s technology then you shouldn't be working in computing.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Stop

        Not very meaningful

        Your "entire infrastructure" being ... what? A multi-billion dollar banking concern or a couple of guys in a coffee shop? If you can't describe what you're talking about, then you shouldn't be writing.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Barron's Mark Veverka

    Did you know that "veverka" is Czech for "squirrel"?

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  4. AnonymousDareDevil

    Why?

    The author does a great job of promoting Amazon, but never really explains why it is such a magical solution for scaling applications...

    One could argue that Google has much more experience with complex applications and huge scale, like Google Docs, Maps or all the Ads stuff and the data mining associated.

    One could also say that Microsoft has a long history with developers and will offer the easiest path from the desktop/web to the cloud. Just think of how many companies still use IE 6 because of "legacy" web apps.

    Or one could point out how Oracle represents, for many organizations, their data and business logic, even when they don't provide all the business applications. While scalability means savings in investment, business data and processes means clients and revenue.

    Or one could talk about IBM and their solid, no nonsense image.

    Or VMware, Cisco, HP, etc...

    One could say many things, but one should especially say why... this one thinks.

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  5. Matt Asay

    Not really cloud hype...

    I guess it looks a bit like Amazon cheerleading, but that's not the intent. The intent is to look at what scale is doing to the industry, and (at least initially) it clearly favors those, like Amazon and Rackspace, who understand how to scale. Google, too. I don't count out Microsoft (despite the title given to the piece), but I think it has a long way to go to learn how to think beyond isolated computing units (desktops, servers) and instead grok the potential power behind Azure, rather than just the basic operations.

    At any rate, I also should have talked more about Rackspace, which now has a significant asset - OpenStack - that could be of significant benefit in its counterargument to Amazon. But I had to stop writing at some point. :-)

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