Windows Azure: Why Microsoft Better Get it Right

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But even that isn't as important as what else Azure will provide: the mix of cloud economics and innovation with Windows infrastructure. One can argue that other providers (e.g., Amazon Web Services) could offer the same capability of hosting Windows infrastructure capabilities, so Azure, on first blush might not seem so important. However, these offerings would face the same issue alluded to earlier, namely, Microsoft's competitive advantage available through marginal license pricing (of course, that might be subject to antitrust issues, so the advantage actually might be moot). However, and this is not in doubt, Microsoft undoubtedly has an unanswerable advantage in that it can extend its components' architectures-at least theoretically-to be better suited to cloud infrastructure. That is to say, Microsoft could, say, take .NET, which today is primarily focused on operating on a single server, and extend it to transparently operate on a farm of servers, scaling up and down depending upon load. And this is where Azure could-could-get revolutionary. Marrying today's widely distributed Microsoft skill base with a cloud-capable architecture based on established Microsoft component development approaches, APIs, etc., could unleash a wave of innovation at least as great as the innovation already seen in EC2 (see this previous posting for some insight about today's cloud innovation). In fact, given the relative skill distribution of Linux vs. Windows, one could expect the Azure wave to be even larger.

Of course, this is all future tense, and by no means certain. Microsoft has, in the past, announced many, many initiatives that ultimately fizzled out. More challenging, perhaps, is how a company with large, established revenue streams will nurture a new offering that might clash with those established streams. This is Clayton Christensen territory. It can be all-too-tempting to skew a new offering to "better integrate" with current successful products to the detriment of the newcomer.

Microsoft has a mixed track record in this regard. I won't make a prediction about how it will turn out, but it will be a real challenge. However, cloud computing is, to my mind, at least, too important to fail at.

Cloud computing is at least as important as the move to distributed processing. If you track what distributed processing has meant to business and society-a computing on every desk and in every home, etc., etc.-you begin to get an appreciation for why Microsoft has to successfully address the cloud. Azure is a bet-the-company initiative-and there's a reason they're called bet-the-company: they're too important to fail at. So Microsoft needs to get Azure right.

Bernard Golden is CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus, which specializes in virtualization, cloud computing and related issues. He is also the author of "Virtualization for Dummies," the best-selling book on virtualization to date.