Tag Archives: Microsoft

How the different DNAs of Amazon, Microsoft and Google influence their Cloud Platforms.

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Disclaimer: This is an opinionated post. The views and platitudes are solely based on my own experience and observations.

AAG – AWS, Azure & GCP

AWS, Azure and GCP are respectively from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. These companies have different roots, values strengths and weaknesses. Each of them has a different DNA, which influences their cloud services in diverse ways. This article shows a completely different perspective about how the different DNAs of these organizations have been shaping their cloud market.  

AWS – The Retail DNA

AWS has the retail DNA from the roots of Amazon’s e-commerce business culture. Few notable key traits of the retail DNA are shipping fast to be the first, more focus on volume than margins and packaging under own brands known as private labeling.

Amazon launched AWS in 2006. Early adapters and open-source folks went ahead with AWS, this includes many current successful startups who were catching up during 2008-2013. Although Microsoft launched Azure later that period in 2011, it was less matured, and Microsoft did not have a good repo with open-source communities then. Being the first to market without a serious competition, AWS took the whole advantage of the situation during that period.

AWS follows a continuous innovation cycle and keeps on releasing new services although those services are either less popular or only useful to a smaller set of customers. AWS does this to be the first in the market, not worrying about the bottom-line.

Another interesting trait of the retail DNA is Private Labeling. Private labeling is a business technique used by retail players to package common goods from suppliers under their own labels with some value additions. AWS uses this technique very cleverly. AWS has an inherent weakness of not having any established software or operating systems of its own. This does not play well for AWS when it comes to cloud lock-in or giving generous discounts to the customers on software licenses. However, using private labeling AWS has been successfully battling this challenge by creating its own services. Few examples are Aurora DB which is a private label of MySQL/Postgres and Redshift is another successful example.

Azure – The Modern Enterprise DNA

Azure has the DNA of a modern enterprise. Modern Enterprise DNA has old traits like bottom line focus, partner ecosystem and speaking the corporate lingo combined with modern traits such as innovation, openness, and platform strategy.

Azure is not a laggard when it comes to innovations, Azure has its own share of innovative services with more focus on developer productivity and enterprise adaption. Azure Active Directory, Azure Cosmos Database, Azure Functions and Azure Lighthouse are few of those several enterprise-focused innovative services.

Generally, Azure targets its innovations at stable markets where they anticipate greater adaption, they do not invest much on niche market areas just to appear cool. This may be because of the traditional bottom-line focused business orientation. Because of this trait, sometimes we can notice that Azure terminates few services at their beta stage without releasing in General Availability, thus focusing on stable high reach bottom-line focused innovations over diversity of the service portfolio.

Having a rich partner ecosystem is another key strength of Microsoft. This has given an unbeatable position for Microsoft in hybrid cloud market with its Azure Stack suite. Azure Stack is a portfolio of products that extends the Azure capabilities to any environment. It has three products Azure Stack Edge, Azure Stack HCI and Azure Stack Hub. In other terms, Azure Stack is Azure in different versions, loaded in different hardware and bundled together for customers having different hybrid cloud demands. This is only possible by Microsoft because of its long-standing partner ecosystem and OEM partner network.

GCP – Internet Services DNA

GCP has the DNA of an Internet services company; in fact, there is no surprise as it is coming from Google. Google leads the Internet based consumer services; we all use Google services in our day-to-day life. Internet services DNA prioritizes individual services over a whole platform, and it prioritizes B2C over B2B.

GCP is the third largest cloud provider by revenue, but the gap between GCP and Azure is big. Also, GCP has a serious competition from Ali Cloud.

GCP has all the required foundational building blocks of a modern cloud, but it lacks the rich portfolio of services what AWS or Azure has. GCP tries to sell the same thing under different packaging, one example – API management service is listed as ‘New Business Channels using APIs’ and ‘Unlocking Legacy Applications using APIs’. Those are two different use cases of the same product, but not two different services. Though some may debate, this is an approach to attract customers with two different needs, other cloud providers do not do the same trick under their list of products.

Google is a successful Internet services company; Google should have been the leader in cloud computing. Ironically, it did not happen because Google did not believe in enterprise businesses. They were so focused on Internet based services and generating revenue by content advertisements. Individual users were more important than big businesses. When they realized big corporates are the big customers for the cloud business it was bit too late, and they had to bring the leadership from outside to get that thinking.

Google’s Internet service DNA has made GCP fragmented, the perception about GCP as one solid platform is vastly missing. Most of us use GCP services without much attention to the whole platform. We use Google Maps in applications, Firebase has become a necessity for mobile development, we use Google search APIs, but we see them as individual services, not as single cloud platform. The single platform thinking is essential to win the enterprise customers, not having such perception is a major downside of GCP.

However, it is not all bad for GCP, amongst these odds Google seems happy with what they are doing. They are showing upward trend in the revenue, and recently won few notable enterprise customers.

Microsoft doesn’t embrace it own products

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I have noticed few things that makes me feel that MS doesn’t embrace its own products sometimes. For example when MS launched Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 there were massive marketing campaigns about the phone.

But in the Live / Hotmail (now Outlook) login page iPhone was in the middle as a highlighted smartphone which supports Hotmail / Live. Then thankfully someone noticed it and changed it. Later WP was in the middle.

Yesterday I came across a big frustrating problem when dealing with Windows Azure websites. MS has been doing a really great job with Azure and Azure websites deployment provides plenty of options to host the websites. We can pull the website files from various sources and Dropbox is also available. But they don’t have an option to pull a folder from Skydrive to Azure websites, they still have an option for Dropbox.

I cant believe this. Really confused.

Capture

After few minutes I saw this tweet.

c2

I really don’t know what’s going on.  But I think this is the real problem in MS now. There’s no communication, everyone does something in their own. But MS is not a company which became big yesterday. They should have and I hope definitely they should be having processes for integration and a streamlined communication between products. I wonder whether they don’t have the processes or someone has forgotten it in the middle.

Few words from Jobs…..

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This is an extraction of a set of exact words from Jobs, from his biography – by Walter Isaacson. I just made it available here. The note’s somewhat big and I can either offend this or defend this. But I just like the way it was.

……..

At different times in the past, there were companies that exemplified Silicon Valley. It was Hewlett-Packard for a long time. Then, in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and Intel. I think that it was Apple for a while, and then that faded. And then today, I think it’s Apple and Google – and a little more so Apple.

I think Apple has stood the test of time. It’s been around for a while, but it’s still at the cutting edge of what’s going on.

It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They’ve clearly fallen from their dominance. They’ve become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been.

Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it’s never been my goal, and I wonder, in the end, it was his goal.

I admire him for the company he built – it’s impressive and I enjoyed working with him. He’s bright and actually has a good sense of humor. But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when they saw Mac, they couldn’t copy it well. They totally didn’t get it.

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM and Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on the revenues, not the product engineers or designers. So the salesperson end up running the company.

John Akers at IBM was a smart eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he didn’t really know anything about product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened in Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don’t think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer running it.

……

x64 Microsoft Strategy

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I write this post after a real piss off, by the Microsoft’s x64 strategy. They announced that in future all of their applications will be working on x64 architecture. As to the statement SharePoint 2010, Windows Server 2008 R2 and some other came in x64 bit only mode.

Even I did a clean format of my PC and installed x64 Windows 7 in order to run SharePoint 2010 and other as well. But what’s the problem ?

They are not clean in their x64 policy. It is totally messed up with x86 applications. Even in x64 bit Windows 7, Windows Media Player runs in 32 bit mode. And Visual Studio 2010 runs in x86 and there is no x64 version of that. (The reason for that, they say is the difficult of development and the application grows bulky)

And every time I start IE is get starts in the x86 mode. There is another x64 version of browser as well in the list. I was wondering why it is not used as default. After wondering I made my IE9 x64 version as the default browser. That gave me the real piss !@#

In the IE9  x64 bit release  (the modern browser) Silverlight cannot run. When ever I reach a website with the Silverlight content it asks me to install the Silverlight.

When I click the link this is the message that I get.

image

Microsoft Vs. Adobe

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Hi, Yesterday I saw a post on the Facebook linking to a mashable.com post saying that MS has plans to acquire Adobe. The post continues on what will happen and all that. The news that the plans of MS on acquiring the Adobe is not official, but it was an interesting post to read.

In the IT filed the acquiring chain of the companies has been there from the very beginning, since it is vital to take the competitive advantage. Some companies operate and put their hands on very new technologies believing that big giants will acquire them one day. If we have a look on the history you cannot even believe the numbers.

So far Microsoft has acquired or merged 128 companies Surprised smile Yep, here’s the list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Microsoft

And Google has acquired or merged 80 companies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google

Apple has acquired more than 30 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple 

Adobe and the Oracle have also have their share in acquisition, with more than 30 companies each.

The chain grows and grows, last few months Apple was trying to acquire Adobe. Ultimately Apple banned the Adobe Flash in it’s iPad and iPhone. Users suffer lot, they can’t view the contents of the websites like YouTube and Hulu. Sad smile

That was a stupid move I guess. Annoyed

Now there are news spreading out that MS is trying to acquire the Adobe. Really MS is trying very hard to make a reasonable share on the mobile market through their Windows Phone 7. Really the previews and the promised features were amazing in WP7 and even the iPhone users are having a WoW on WP7. But when compared to the iPhone, Andriod and Blackberry WP7 has a very small market share.

And do not talk about MS Kin it was boom, only 750 people in the world are using it; and MS closed it immediately after one week of its release. But MS always want to have its own pie in the mobile market. Now they are in the right track with the WP7 which is powered by Silverlight.

But if MS acquires Adobe how this going to help them on knocking down their rapidly growing rivals Google and the Apple. (Of course they are not too much Rrrrr….. with Google). So how they can knock down the Apple.

They can quite the Adobe products to Mac. (but they are not going to do, since it is a billion dollar business and they do not want to loss that revenue in order to knock their enemy).

There is another issue on Silverlight and the Flash. Ooops this is real heck. I think what MS will do to the Flash is; it will simply ignore it. (it is a very good strategy to knock things down) A recent example is what Oracle did to mySQL after acquiring the Sun. (Really Oracle messed up the Sun)

Silverlight gain the popular and now it is one of the technologies that industry seeks. And we can do plenty of things in Silverlight that we cannot perform in Flash. The secret is the .NET platform. (a platform always beats an application). That’s why MS made the Silverlight as platform geared with the .NET. Now Silverlight is a platform for Web, Xbox, Zune and Windows Mobile. Why even to the desktop.

There are more Flash based websites but Silverlight is started to gain popularity and the market share.

So if MS acquires the Adobe it won’t help MS to get the share in the mobile market. (but they can do) But however they are adding a billions and billions of business to their venture. Think about MS Photoshop, MS SoundForge, MS After Effects …Smile

Smile Surprised smile Annoyed Secret telling smile All the expressions are possible.

Blogs Here and There

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Based some on going and some few past topics I write this entry here. I summarized some interesting topics that I read from here ant there in the cloud.

As we all know with the launch of Windows 7 (actually windows version 6.1) MS got the sensational hit again which it lost due to the Vista. (personally I don’t find that Vista sucked much but it is really a big fat OS) Another reason that why Vista was not accepted by the users was; MS thought the users are somewhat OK with high security controls in local networks. But really it was not the case. I remember when the launching of Windows 7 there was a blog post saying that Windows  7 will rock, because it is smarter and fool enough. I have another experience with an IT guy complained about the UAC system of Vista. It is really useful indeed and a good security protection. We have this in Windows 7 too, but some people still don’t want to have it. (here most of them complain because they do not know how to stop the UAC – but I recommend you to not to stop that)

Stepping away from the MS and you can see plenty of posts and news around the web about the Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and later part of the Java and mySQL. It was a moment that nobody thought that why Sun can’t stand alone. Of course Sun had the power and the strength to stand alone, but someone from the top rank decided to sell it. After Oracle acquired the Sun first all thought Oracle will bump on the mySQL and bang it. But it won’t happen. There are not any reasonable updates or new releases on any of the Sun’s products after the Oracle acquired Sun. What happened to JavaFX ? It was completely forgotten in the shadow of Silverlight. Now Oracle sue Google on Davlik (a JVM for Andriod). Where the patent rights go? What is the future of the open office ? But still Oracle keeps it competing bob – mySQL alive.

Java is an excellent platform which opened plenty of new trends in modern web standards. No body can deny this, but what is the future. I’m not against Java but the what does the Oracle buggers do? .NET needs a perfect competition.

Apache is funded by the MS in order to get the competition to IIS. (are you shocked ? but it is the truth Apache is funded by MS)