back to article Microsoft: We tried to use Azure ourselves last year, and couldn't

In the first half of 2011, Microsoft made a series of changes at the top of the team running Windows Azure, its cloud. “A large group of new people came into the Azure team,” general manager Bill Hilf said at a Microsoft cloud event in London last week. “Satya Nadella came over, Scott [Guthrie] came over, I came over at the …

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  1. JDX Gold badge

    Back to basics

    If the story is true, then for that at least they deserve some commendation. Though they should be eating their own dog-food to start with really!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Back to basics

      MS do have a history of dogfooding, only recently they announced that Bing.com was actually running off Server 2012 Release Candidate (i.e. they say that the RC is good enough to use in production) http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2012/06/07/bing-com-runs-on-windows-server-2012.aspx

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        The art of being late to your own party

        A history? You mean like replacing their accounting machinery with ten times the amount of NT servers and ending up having to revert? With taking years and years before iis is stable enough to run their own homepage? And so on? That history?

        I'd expect products and services get tested before initial release. This appears to be entirely too hard for certain companies. Like, oh, complete failure to run regression tests, even automated ones, as seen in reinstatement of really old attacks on brand spanking new "reimplemented" IP stacks, and, well, things like this. It's nice to do this sort of test, but doing it after everyone else already has tried and failed is just, well, what's the superlative of being late?

        1. JDX Gold badge

          I'd expect products and services get tested before initial release

          You misunderstand. Testing is done, but actually making people use it for real is not the same as testing. i.e. checking all the features of Word work and it doesn't have bugs is testing, but forcing all your staff to use the new version in day to day use is "dogfooding".

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            "dogfooding"

            The term for what's described in the article is actually "hallway testing", and apple made quite a name in usability because this is what they do zealously.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The art of being late to your own party

          To be fair, the machines which ran their accounts were AS/400 minicomputers and were replaced by NT servers, which ran on microcomputers, vastly less powerful machines at the time. It's hardly surprising that they needed a whole load more machines, but micros were also vastly cheaper than minis.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Back to basics

        Bing is your example - Oh good grief !

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Back to basics

          Yes, Bing. 15% of internet searches (#2 in the US) is no small thing, and Bing has shown greater growth (rise of 1.7% from 13.6% to 15.4% in 12 months, vs 0.2% from 66.2% to 66.4% rise for Google).

          So, for MS to use their release candidate Server OS for Bing shows their confidence in their product, especially increasing Bing's market share is important for MS.

          1. Eddie Edwards
            FAIL

            Re: Back to basics

            So percentage market share growth is difficult when you already have 66%, and easy when you only have 14%. What does that prove? The fact the incumbent is growing their share *at all* should cause severe concern for Microsoft. Their growth is not coming from Google's losses. It's coming from losses at the legacy search engines. They already beat AOL, now they're beating Yahoo. If it was still 1998, this would actually be quite exciting.

          2. BlueGreen

            Re: Back to basics

            "Yes, Bing. 15% of internet searches blah blah blah blah blah blah blah [snip] blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah"

            Hello M$ marketing droid, welcome to el reg! You bring a welcome dose of truth to these pages, thank god for honest statistics.

      3. Tim 11
        Happy

        Re: Re: Back to basics

        it's ok running bing on a beta platform, but dogfooding would involve an application that people actually use

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Back to basics

      Can you imagine this happening in the UK? Take a bunch of executives and ask them to build a working IT system.

      I've never had any job where this would be remotely plausible.

  2. Homer 1
    Headmaster

    American-centric "stats"

    Meanwhile, Bing's global market share (i.e. the real metric) is only 4%.

    Just a brief reality check.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: American-centric "stats"

      Why is global market share "the real metric"? According to that, Yahoo is 2nd at 6.6%, Baidu is 3rd at 6.1% and Bing is 4th at 4.4%. Is Baidu, the 3rd most popular search engine, used much outside China? More importantly, is any other search engine permitted inside China? Is it likely that the 3rd place entry is skewed due to China?

      And remember, 4.4% of a big number is still a big number!

      Apparently, worldwide there are 3bn internet searches per day, or 1000bn per year. 4.4% of that is 44bn internet searches using Bing every year. That's 1,400 searches per second.

      Admittedly, Google is doing 808bn searches per year, or 25,600 searches per second, but even the 2nd place search engine only manages 2,000 searches per second.

      Again, I'll say that MS using their *release candidate* server OS to power their Bing search engine is proof that they believe it's ready for production use.

      1. Homer 1
        Holmes

        Re: American-centric "stats"

        'Why is global market share "the real metric"?'

        Because it's the whole truth, rather than just a convenient portion of it.

        Obviously.

        1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: American-centric "stats"

          Because it's the whole truth, rather than just a convenient portion of it.

          I'd like to point out that Bing has 100% of the Bing search market share.

          Though unfortunately they've shown no growth in that market, and prospects for future growth look dim.

      2. Homer 1
        Windows

        Re: American-centric "stats"

        Oh, and as for Microsoft's use of its own slopware being some sort of "proof" of merit... I believe the appropriate response is "LOL!".

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    MS

    Every time you start using MS software you get hurt in the end. Their regex engine, word with its bugs, excel with its crashing, the ribbon, javscript with its bugs, access with its bugs, windows which tied up our admin for a day just because it felt like it, deliberately fucking up web standards etc. etc. et fucking cetera, and now mssql.

    We were going to migrate to mssql at work at my behest but that's not going to happen now I've discovered a most fascinating erm, 'improvement' ... well, let's say I don't consider it fit for purpose any more so we'll be going to postgres. Oh and mssql documentation has become progressively shitter and less correct, causing some embarrassing bugs in live code.

    Use MS -> get burnt. Decades of experience taught me that.

    1. JDX Gold badge

      Re: MS

      "decades of experience" means you're an old, past-it has-been :)

  4. steeplejack
    Flame

    Architect is a professional person not a verb.

    When are the yankee ignoramuses going to realise that you design something?

    1. Tom Maddox Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Re: Architect is a professional person not a verb.

      Just as soon as you pompous, toothless, tea-swilling Benny Hill aficionados stop putting "u" in too goddamn many words.

      1. Geoffrey W

        Re: Architect is a professional person not a verb.

        RE "you pompous, toothless, tea-swilling Benny Hill aficionados "

        Well excuse me. We dumped the grinning buffoon a long time ago and stopped watching him. It was the USA that kept him in royalties and adulation after that.

        The other insults are fine and I can live with them.

  5. Tom Maddox Silver badge
    Go

    Wow

    Color me impressed that the executives were willing to sit down and do this exercise. Color me even more impressed that they actually were capable of even attempting to build an application. I would love to see similar news come out of other companies.

    1. asdf
      FAIL

      Re: Wow

      Did you miss the part "About a third of the people weren’t able to actually sign up successfully, which was kind of embarrassing"? Kind of explains the lack of imagination and competence in delivering new products the last five years or so.

      1. Tom Maddox Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Re: Wow

        No, but at least they were willing to try; I have a hard time envisioning most corporate executives even being *able* to do this, much less willing.

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