Presentation on Azure/Live/Mesh on the PDC

I just watch a presentation on the PDC on MS Azure and Windows Live by Chris Anderson and Don Box. These guys had a great presentation prepared and it was pretty fun to watch. They showed a bunch of great techniques and demo-ed how Azure will host your stuff (applications and data alike). They also showed how easy it is to get something going with techniques and languages that we already know like C#, LinQ, et cetera. In my mind it shows the counter part to the Google Apps platform (and probably beyond that).

However, they hardly got any applause which I think was very funny in itself. Although the stuff they showed was excellent and pretty ground breaking. Now, why didn’t they got the applause that they were quite obviously expecting?

A couple of reasons are possible:

1. The audience didn’t get it. Nah, there are a couple of thousand developers in the audience and probably all very smart programming on a day to day basis. That can’t be it.
2. The stuff isn’t that special and people thinking: what’s so special about that? That can be it, but that would probably because the stuff is so easy to do. From within Visual Studio and with a couple of easy mouse clicks you can deploy your software out there and the same goes for your data.
3. Now, the third reason might be it (and it is the reason why I didn’t clap my hands a lot). This is ground breaking stuff that gives companies and developers a lot of power to create new solutions quickly and much faster than before. But, would you trust your applications and data in the hands of Microsoft?

I think that for applications that provide public services, like route finding applications, this all is great stuff. You can very quickly create your app, deploy it out there in the cloud for others to use. However for you business application you would like to keep your stuff on your own machines.

Now, what was shown in the demo, and maybe wasn’t emphasized enough, is the lack of needing to know where stuff is. It might be in the clouds or on your own machines, it might be in an Azure SQL Server database or in your own: it doesn’t matter. Simply by changing a root URI you can use the stuff from where ever it is.

So far I think Azure and the like is great stuff and I will certainly be thinking on how to use it. It is just not clear to me yet how I can use it in our software (which creates documentation solutions). But, maybe I should give myself a bit of time to think about that.

Bye,

Bart