An unprecedented new challenge: Microsoft can continue to hold the position?

Now it may be unbelievable to go back and say, but in those days, as early as October 2008 when Microsoft first launched Windows Azure Services, it was indeed speculated: Microsoft will not fight with Netscape before fighting Internet Explorer Like siege plunder, with Windows Azure again in one fell swoop into the cloud computing. What Microsoft used after all means? What exactly Windows services or features can make people completely unfazed by Azure so much so that no other competitor can stand firm in front of it?

After about three years, most of the so-called conspiracy theories seem ridiculous. None of them are true. Now that Amazon is a leader in cloud-based virtual machines (and despite fierce competition), VMware is the leader in enterprise-class virtualization services (Citrix is ​​in the lead) and Salesforce is a cloud-based application , And Heroku (Salesforce's product) is said to be just around the corner, saying it's not just feasible or practical to consider Azure in terms of market importance.

In the eyes of many customers Azure is expected to regain the competitive advantage of being a persistent image, and Microsoft also refers to persistent images as "virtual machine roles." This is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) One of the services that Rackspace and GoGrid customers typically require is to deploy the server image to a public cloud and then use it to host the application programmatically. This is not an invaluable technique, at least not. A year or so ago, this The features appear in the beta version of Azure.

MSDN's latest beta release notes: "The role of virtual machines gives you a great deal of control over virtual machines, and also offers the many benefits of running inside a Windows Azure environment: immediate scalability without incurring In-place upgrade of out-of-service, integration with other components you serve, and load-balanced traffic.The virtual machine role consists of operating systems built using basic virtual hard disks (VHDs) and one or more differentiated VHD. Using virtual machine roles also requires service definition files and service profiles. "

Instead of developing and running code managed by the .NET Framework running in the cloud, Azure's main PaaS service now works just like this, deploying an operating system image and then managing the image directly, just like Amazon What users have done over the years. My friend Mary Jo Foley has been paying close attention to this: Curiously, the MSDN documentation uses a neutral term of "operating system image" instead of the "Windows Server Imaging" or the same specific Some other statement. Foley therefore believes that the company is willing to open up Azure to host other types of server images, including Linux.

While such an event will ultimately involve Microsoft in the whims of customers - just like Amazon, it does not make the company a natural player to match rivals. Even ensuring that the fairness of the competitive environment may not be enough; Microsoft needs to create a competitive advantage that builds competitive advantage over the past.

Being a "full service" provider may not be enough because, as Amazon has demonstrated, different services attract different categories of customers. Compared to Google, Microsoft maintains a certain advantage in the field of software as a service (SaaS). In this area, Google Apps (Google Apps) still features too weak, too limited, too unreliable, inability to compete with Office. Having said that, Office Web Apps must still be improved. Azure is not a weakness in the PaaS space, but in the face of such unnamed junior competition as Heroku, it takes several more successful moves, just as last month's active acceptance of Node.js led Azure to break through the .NET shell Bound.

Among consumers, there is a more direct connection between the PC-facing Windows and Microsoft's cloud services. We have seen some examples of Windows 8, but this is not enough. Windows Live is still considered too much of an "online service" - a name reminiscent of the old CompuServe and Prodigy. Consumers want to see Microsoft's cloud services as software, and they need Office 15 (but not Office 2015) as a cloud service.

However, this will not enhance Azure's position in the enterprise and can not be improved by itself. Microsoft must become cost-competitive, a new challenge it has never had before. In 2012, in the face of a strong competitor, Microsoft can not successfully maintain its position, it depends on three factors:
1) How many customers will Microsoft take from leading IaaS vendors such as Amazon and Rackspace?
2) How will Microsoft expand its PaaS service, not just Node.js?
3) How long after Amazon and other competitors will respond to Microsoft's move with a price war?