Hey! You! Get off of my cloud.

The moral of today's tale is simply this:

Hosting your software on a 'cloud' who's masters are not happy about the rise of "cloud computing" may not be the wisest strategy.

I am referring to the story regarding Microsoft's Azure Services Platform.  Namely that Microsoft could block popular Azure apps that exceed their allocated storage and/or processing hours.  

According to The Register article I am linking to, your allocation limit is 2000 hours and 8 instances of processing time.

I think this puts into question Microsoft's commitment to Cloud Computing.  Since Cloud Apps, such as Google's, threaten the cash cow of Microsoft Office sales, I am reminded of how Microsoft effectively killed Web Applets nearly a decade ago.

Of course one hopes that Microsoft is paying attention here and changes this policy.

Meanwhile: Cloud Buyers Beware.

Comments

[bikingbill]

One of the reasons Applets failed is that Microsoft deliberately broke Java by making a version for Windows that was incompatible with Java on other platforms.

There are more reasons. Good article on this:

http://www.psynixis.com/blog/2007/05/03/top-5-reasons-why-java-applets-failed/

[Matthew Saroff]

How about a quick history of the death of web applets?

I always thought that it was the unbearable lightness of Java that did them in.