Slashdot

Constantly locked in to a upgrade path? No, way. No way will anyone go for this for anything real.

In a world with new wars, pandemics, food crises, and economic meltdowns, it is good to know that the morals of one company have stayed the same. Microsoft is our rock in these crazy times.

I'm sure he's already started on an open-source Mono-based Azure clone.

Those dark clouds i saw on the way home.

So why is there any reason to believe MS won't provide backward compatibility on their cloud stuff? That's what they do on the desktop....

No i didn't RTFA, its a tradition i didn't want to break with.

This is what Microsoft do. Its what they've done for decades, and it has made them hundreds of billions of dollars. The message they get from this is that customers don't mind their lock in, provided they get stuff that works. Therefore they don't see what they do as being wrong. If indeed it is wrong. I'm not so sure anymore.

Microsoft software works, and usually works pretty well (Not including that heap of poo that is Vista, oh gods I hate that). Bottom line? Most companies buy Microsoft solutions, and you would be amazed how many still don't even know what Open Source is.

They will continue to do so until Open Source software gets marketing as aggressive as that employed by Microsoft. It ain't about code/product quality boys and girls, its about your sales force. IBM learned this lesson early on. Microsoft learned it too, but Open Source is still laboring under the false impression that just having better code is enough.

It isn't, trust me on this.

... as opposed to, say, Google App Engine.

One could look at this in one of two ways. The first way is the line taken by the summary writer, that it's doom, gloom and disaster. In practice, this is actually the most likely scenario, as the alternative I'm going to suggest has never been seriously adopted by software vendors yet.

And now for that alternative! Writing code correctly. (Ooooh, scary! Just right for Halloween.) Correct code does not mean "correct according to Microsoft's preferred style", it means "abstracted out, so you don't give a damn about the underlying architecture" with "vendor-specific and platform-specific details encapsulated and hidden by portability libraries and high-level languages". If you write code that will run just equally well on a Cray 2, PC compatible, Apple, SGI Indigo or a microprocessor-controlled toaster, you can afford to simply not care what Microsoft does. The portability library(s), which might be any combination of cross-platform Open Source or Commercial libraries for common stuff, provides almost total immunity from Microsoft API changes, gives you (next to) zero upgrade costs (the "actual" costs are distributed across all of the vendors tied to the library at the time AND in future) and minimizes the risks (the minimum amount of 3rd party code is changed per API change and the maximum number of arcs are tested because everyone linking into the code becomes a QA).

Since the only practical method of maintaining such a model at the pace at which Microsoft breaks^H^H^H^H^H^Hchanges things is Open Source, it will force an increase in the adoption of Open Source methods and Open Source tools. At which point, Microsoft becomes a rather expensive bit-player in the operation, in comparison to alternative clouds. Since portability libraries eliminate lock-in, as well as upgrade headaches, companies would start going with the cheaper option.

This isn't going to happen, of course. Although the tie-in with Microsoft is harming vendors, creating excess overhead and reducing reliability, PHBs won't see it that way. All they will see is that lock-in means you can Blame Somebody Else. You can't sue them, you almost certainly can't even get them to honour their service agreements or any other contracts, but so what? Having Someone Else To Blame is the cornerstone of office politics. Good decisions are not. It doesn't matter if the company sinks as a result, since the notion of "company loyalty" is seen as something "old-fashioned" and inconsequential in today's environment. You go in, you get your paycheck, you eventually move on. It's expected. So why should a manager, who has no interest beyond looking good to other managers, care about good decisions? It won't earn them any more money, it won't get them any more respect, it won't give them a promotion, and it leaves them vulnerable to back-stabbing from other managers.

Because you spend so much time serving the Microsoft machine. Not just licensing, product activation and the time and resources that takes, but the constant upgrade cycles, new languages, new versions of the frameworks, security patches that break things...it's all freaking insane.

We scrapped all that. Servers, desktops, dev tools, everything and migrated our development environment and desktops to open source. We can scale for the cost of hardware, our dev tools are simple, don't take all day to install and don't hog all your system resources. We use a lot of command line and prefer it. While you're still installing VisualStudio and getting through registration, we're already working.

Our ROI is off the scale, we have more cash, spend more time actually working and we're turning out systems in time frames that would be the envy of any development shop. We use open source in business and our business works. I came out of a big Windows shop and we blow away anything they're doing with a fraction of the personnel.

So now MS wants to take elements from several product lines, put it in a blender, then lock developers into their way of doing things. Gosh, let me think about that...no.

If Microsoft offered real value, simple licensing terms, and provided products that actually contributed to our enterprise environment without being a dickish pain in the ass, we'd probably have a place for their products in our mix. But right now, no freaking way. Anything MS touches turns to crap. Their products are slow, complicated and bloated and we get by just fine without them.

This guy has just blown out a load of basless speculation and your all buying into it (any giving him page hits).

Likely you'll leave your Microsoft applications running on the platform version they're developed for while Microsoft may host many platform versions side-by-side. It's not unlike Google maps where developers can choose the API version their application runs with 1.x, 2.x, etc. Microsoft might be evil but they're not stupid, and they've been creating develop tools and frameworks for a very long time. They won't alienate their developers so there's no sense to assume a fearful stance because of a Slashdot submission like this.

I haven't delved deep into the workings of either... but is the Azure/Microsoft lockin any different than lockin would be in writing apps for Google's App Engine?

I'm usually the first to bash Microsoft. I'm usually the last to defend them. I do think they deserve every bit of flame they get.

But this is just getting stupid...

Apple did exactly the same thing with OS X. I'm talking about the initial launch -- OS X was a completely backwards-incompatible change from OS 9. In fact, there were major architectural changes -- like the introduction of such modern features as protected memory -- which would have made it pretty much impossible to maintain pure backwards compatibility and do everything they wanted to do.

So they said "fuck it", switched to a completely different architecture, and wrote an emulation/virtualization system called Classic.

One thing which I know I've heard described for Windows 7 was the ability to run an older version (like Vista) in a virtual machine. You know, kind of like Classic. The only difference would be if Microsoft wanted to charge you for the license -- and I hope they aren't that stupid.

I (and others) have frequently disparaged Microsoft for their bloated, crufty, undocumented (or under-documented, or mis-documented), and downright weird APIs. I know that before I heard about this change (which isn't news, by the way, it's been on Slashdot before), I figured I would do exactly the same thing if I was in Microsoft's shoes. Don't even try to support the old APIs -- just start entirely from scratch, build a compatibility layer, and tell people to upgrade.

One more thing, and then I'm done: What the fuck does this have to do with lock-in? What, did you think Win32 was open? It's only portable thanks to Wine, and Wine never has, never will, never can catch up and support every single app.

If you're going to be locked in anyway, why not be locked into something newer and (presumably) cleaner?

If it's not clean, that's another argument. But this strategy is not about lock-in.

End rant.

Unlimited broadband seems to be going away, bandwidth caps are coming in, traffic shaping is already here and Microsoft want to move the processing to remote data centres? I look forward to scanning a photograph, editing it with CloudPaint and printing it out on my local printer using the generous 9kbytes/second upstream 200kbytes downstream i get from Virgin Media. I don't think i will even bother looking at CloudVideoEditor.