Windows Azure Offers Developers Iron-Clad Lock-in 227
snydeq writes "Microsoft's move to the cloud is certain to create a whole new kind of developer partner, Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes. But as much as Microsoft ISVs will likely go along with the shift to Windows Azure to keep revenue streams going, the kind of lock-in they will experience will be worlds away from what they face today. Rather than being able to ignore the new version of a key framework, developers will have no other option than to update their code to suit Microsoft's latest platform. That kind of lock-in will leave customers in the lurch, subject to their vendors' bottom lines, as ISVs that can't afford to rework code to keep up with Microsoft's latest platform will begin dropping services, and customers will have little choice but to accept the new terms of service their vendors send along."
Vuze? (Score:4, Insightful)
No serious enterprise customers will adopt this (Score:5, Insightful)
Constantly locked in to a upgrade path? No, way. No way will anyone go for this for anything real.
Re:Like iPhone (Score:4, Insightful)
The author says at the end that this same situation exists with every other cloud computing host though, and that's a part of the article that should have made it into the Slashdot summary
Re:No serious enterprise customers will adopt this (Score:4, Insightful)
never underestimate human stupidity. after all bush got elected twice.
Frameworks? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
a whole lot if FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Ms is better at legacy support than anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy has just blown out a load of basless speculation and your all buying into it (any giving him page hits).
Re:so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
What marketing? Microsoft didn't have to market until recently because everyone already knew about their products, and most of them were already customers.
Eh? I'm guessing you've never worked in IT. Its hard to find an IT company more focused on marketing than Microsoft.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why the PHB might not fall into this new trap. It seems that MS is trying to force good coding practices, with new fangled ideas like the MVC pattern. It may become easier to write bad code on an existing long term stable system than invest in the highly skilled, and invariably annoying people, that can write code that is so abstracted that components can be changed out on the fly. After all the MS philosophy is machines are cheaper than people, so it is better to buy more machines to run inefficient and buggy code that to pay people to write efficient and reliable code.
Re:so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft actively markets to enterprise customers, PC manufacturers and developers, and always has.
They haven't marketed extensively to home users because they haven't had to. If you have Windows at work, all the programs you want to use are written for it, and it comes installed by default on any new PC, why would you even explore the possibility of getting something else?
Even now, most people don't even realize there are alternatives.
Re:Corral and flog? FUDRUCKER! (Score:2, Insightful)
Again, so-called "cloud" services are only cost-effective under certain conditions. A good sysadmin with cheap bandwidth can run circles around any hosted setup, and you get much more reliable throughput that way (if your sysadmin's any good).
Cloud computing being cheaper is a MYTH. It is billed in more granular fashion, which is great for attention-deficit developers who write the app-of-the-week, get their Digg and /. rush then fade away. Those people are not the driving force of the internet.
Re:so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing he was born sometime around or after 1990. You'd have to have lived in a cave to have missed the Windows 95 marketing (remember how many 'news' stories there were about them buying 'start me up'? Wasn't Gates on Letterman?). They haven't had to do much marketing since Windows 98, granted, because by _that_ point they'd established their ~95% market share.
Re:Ms is better at legacy support than anyone (Score:1, Insightful)
Dude, did you just try to defend Microsoft on Slashdot? Tilting at windmills, but I applaud your effort.
I was going to post to ask people for examples of APIs that broke from .NET 1.1 to 2.0, 2.0 to 3.0 and 3.0 to 3.5... The list is extremely small and I can only think of one from version 1.1 to 2.0 that was in the System.Data namespace and a method got removed.
They do have a point about lock-in with Microsoft's cloud environment, but don't you have that everywhere? Amazon, Google Apps, none of them are interoperable or interchangeable right now, right?
Re:Vuze? (Score:3, Insightful)
So it's OK for MS to remove the "us" at the end of Azureus to make Azure and everybody should be OK with that, but if somebody tries to replace the W in windows with an L to make Lindows, everyone should be up in arms about that?
In both cases, it seems like it has much more to do with WHO owns the trademark than with any sharply objective dividing line of legal fairness.
Re:Vuze? (Score:5, Insightful)
Azure has far more to do with investors than it does with developers. It is all about creating the illusion of long term high profit margin revenue, that can be obtained by lock in style business practices. As M$ is struggling with both Vista and Office 2007, they need something more than the poor fiscal performance of xbox and the disaster of MSN. Google finds itself in a similar problem with regard to high share price limited growth opportunities in search and the inevitable break up of that market.
Crippled cloud solves their fiscal desires but really does nothing for the majority of the market, both of them are really lathering up the hype, advertising as news articles popping up all over the place especially in mass media, all trying to create a demand that doesn't really exist.
Realistically in tight economic times development will stagnate, companies will stick with what they have for as long as they can and only change when they are forced too and then that change will be targeted at long term solutions, where they have the greatest control over outlays and future investment cycles.
Am I missing something? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.