Microsoft Azure?
Capitalist Titanic.
Curt Anderson, CFO for Microsoft's Server & Tools Business, was feeling chatty during an interview with Bloomberg, bragging that in the past year Redmond topped the $1bn sales mark with Windows Azure. Or, maybe not. The Bloomberg story doesn't quote whatever Anderson said directly, and if you read down a bit further into the …
One of the longest standing observations about Microsoft's use of any figures and statistics is that you have to very carefully check them. They are spectacularly good at, umm, "re-interpreting" numbers to fit whatever they are trying to sell you, to the point where I have started to discard anything they say until I had time to evaluate the data for myself.
This is why they like using numbers in presentations: fact checking is a lot harder live, and don't count on them mentioning sources and method of evaluation.
This is further evidence of Microsoft destroying shareholder value. Let's take time out to look at Microsoft's recent history of stillborn products:
1. Windows 8 - no one wants it.
2. Windows Phone - I saw a guy with a windows phone, once.
3. Azure - no take up.
4. Windows XP - a product whose perceived 'success' is due in no small part to Microsoft's monopoly position and a lack of viable alternatives at the time.
5. .NET - great for Windows Devs. Not so great for anyone else.
6.. SQL Server - hey, it's cheaper than Oracle.
and the list goes on...
The time has come for Microsoft to be split up into completely separate businesses enjoying separate ownership, ie. listed or privately owned. It happened to Bell (another Monopolist). It's just a matter of time before it happens to MSFT.
Microsoft is failing its shareholders.
1. They just announced record Windows revenue. This week.
2. Windows Phone is firmly the 3rd mobile OS having overtaken Blackberry and is growing market share faster than Android.
3. Large growth, 1 billion in revenue, or 5K average per customer.
4. Success is success.
5. Great for anyone that wants their software to work without hundreds of runtime versions and the risk of being hacked every other week like Java.
6. It also does almost as much as Oracle - more in some areas - and often does it faster, and has a much much lower TCO.
You are completely right. Unfortunately, this "sad state of affairs" is mainly due to the self-proclaimed FOSS supporter seen above who can't seem to go any further than spreading anti-MS FUD.
Back on-topic : we run some stuff in the cloud (basically web applications on apache/tomcat). I'm looking to extend this to a couple of Windows-centric services, if the point-to-site stuff actually works as advertised I will definitely check out Azure. Mind you: critical services always run both onsite and in the cloud. Non-critical stuff can be cloud-only for all I care.