Svetlana Gladkova is someone I consider to be one of the most thoughtful voices in the blogosphere today.  I rarely disagree with her.   But this quote proves that even the most thoughtful people can go astray when relying on the opinions of others...

I also see another problem for Microsoft venturing to the cloud computing market with Azure. The problem is mainly is in the perception of the company in the developers community. It is well-known that Microsoft products rarely are admired by developers for their reliability and the company itself is often criticized by the developers community for its clumsy attempts to finally build some presence online. Obviously, for developers to adopt this new platform where competitors already exist Azure needs to be a great offer to persuade the developers they need this particular solution and prove it will actually offer a perfect infrastructure and reliability - along with some very competitive pricing.

As pointed out in my last post I'm not on board with Azure but I feel the above characterization is off base. 

I point this out only to show how the tech blogosphere can distort the world to those who track it.  If one was to read the blogs you'd think that Ruby on Rails was the most popular platform in the world and that Microsoft technologies don't hold a candle to it.

But that simply isn't true. 

In fact, a quick look at the Tiobe index for October 2008 shows that Visual Basic and C# have more developers between them than Python, Perl and Ruby combined.  Moreover, the #1 spot still belongs to Java a language that has become nothing short of a punch line on the tech blogs.

The truth is, in the real world, a lot of the darlings of blogging are starting to lose steam.  Looking over at a recent Netcraft study I noticed that Microsoft's IIS webserver has reached 34% of the overall market compared to Apache's 50%.  That's a huge gain (to give some perspective, at the end of 2003 those numbers were 67% to 21%).  Given the huge amount of effort it takes to switch from one web server to another that's a very significant jump for Microsoft.

In the end most of the people who are spouting the opinion that Ms. Gladkova quotes above are zealots who would never use Microsoft software no matter what.  Microsoft could produce software that programs itself and I guarantee David Heinemeir Hansson wouldn't touch it.  So the most important thing for Microsoft right now is to simply focus on building a better platform.  That way they can get the serious developers even if the script kiddies continue to bash them in the blogs.

I specifically held off on writing a post about Amazon's new Windows based EC2 service because I (like everyone else in the tech blogosphere) knew this was coming...

Microsoft layed out its “Azure” foundational infrastructure for the cloud during the keynote kick-off on day one of the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) here in Los Angeles. The goal of Azure is to provide developers who want to write applications that run partially and/or entirely in a remote datacenter with a platform and set of tools.

Microsoft did not disclose pricing, licensing or timing details for Azure. The company is planning to release a Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of Azure to PDC attendees on October 27. (The CTP consists of a software development kit and access to Microsoft’s cloud.

Now that I've seen Microsoft's plan...I think I have to give the nod to Amazon's Cloud based solution. 

There's a lot to like about Microsoft Azure but I just don't think that's what people want anymore.  They don't want to buy into some "grand vision" or to write their programs for a proprietary, locked in system.  That's what Azure seems to be.  It's basically its own proprietary abstraction layer with a bunch of equally proprietary services available to use.

On the other hand, what Amazon does is simply to give you a server in the cloud.  It acts and works just like a server you'd have on your desktop and should you ever choose to move your application back to your own server you could do so almost effortlessly.  That, to me, seems like the way to go and I don't think the value of such a setup can be overestimated.

Cloud Computing is a boon but at the same time a lot of things can go wrong and you simply don't want to tie yourself to one vendor.  Because what happens when that vendor gets overwhelmed and you start to see performance problems, or they institute terms you can't live with, or any of a thousand other scenarios.  I'm in favor of cloud computing but lets remember what it is: Your application running on someone else's computers.

Computers they can do whatever they please with.

Again, I don't want to be too hard on Azure.  It's certainly possible that this is just so visionary that I can't see the beauty of it as of yet.  It is actual laid out quite nicely.  It essentially ties all of the myriad of services that Microsoft has been rolling out since Ray Ozzie came on board into one coherent system that can be used quickly and easily.  But again, to take advantage of it you have to buy into Mr. Ozzie's vision of the future and tie yourself to it. 

In today's technology climate I simply don't see that as a realistic option.