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Vendor lock-in is truly a TERRIBLE idea ... says, er, Microsoft

How the cloud taught Redmond to play by a new set of rules

Turning electricity into profits

Savvy cloud customers are already deploying their applications on not just one vendor's cloud infrastructure, but several. Locking these customers into a single vendor's platform simply isn't an option, because the reasons why they might want to change cloud providers are often going to be beyond Microsoft's control – or even the customer's.

"You might get a very successful operation in a public cloud and be very happy with it, and have some regulatory reason why you're no longer allowed to store your customer data in a public cloud in a particular geo, or something like that. And that can happen at any point," Gossman explained.

"And then there's also just the fact that this cloud industry is pretty young and new. Even if you have chosen a small set of vendors that you're very happy with, they may change their technology strategy."

That's a big part of why today's Microsoft is so eager to talk about its support for Linux on Azure, and even for its support for "foreign" technologies like Docker on its own platform. If it wants to succeed in the cloud market, it needs to operate its business by cloud rules.

Don't think of that as a defeat, either. Redmond has hardly abandoned the proprietary software business, and Gossman told The Reg that there are certain Microsoft products – such as SQL Server and Active Directory – that even customers with significant Linux-based infrastructure are often willing to license.

But if Windows Server licenses aren't selling as briskly as they once were, Microsoft's cloud strategy is its hedge against that decline. Think about it: do you really need to charge customers license fees for a platform to run their applications on if you're billing them by the megabyte and the network packet for the cloud storage service where they keep their data? And the same rules apply for other cloud services, including CPU time.

"There's a utility aspect of the thing, where we just basically turn electricity into compute," Gossman said. "And at that point, we want to run all the world's software, anything that you can do. It doesn't have to be a Microsoft product."

So when Satya Nadella says today's Microsoft loves Linux and that it's happy to participate in the open source world, you can bet he means it. Remember, before being promoted to CEO, Nadella ran the company's cloud, server, and tools business. He knows as well as anyone in Redmond the rules of the modern software marketplace.

And at the end of the day, while today's Microsoft has changed, it's not really a brand-new company at all. It's still in business to make money. And while Azure isn't a huge profit center today, Microsoft's investments to build out its cloud leave it well-positioned to be at the top of the heap when cloud reaches critical mass and private data centers have all but disappeared.

The game has changed, and vendor lock-in is out. But although it has to play by a new set of rules, Microsoft's strategy remains the same: it aims to win. ®

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