Linux Coming to Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud?

Quoting:Surely, Microsoft could extend those Linux partnerships into the Windows Azure cloud — assuming Microsoft really wants to give customers what they want.

MS would never wants to support Linux, but it has no choice, it has to. When some of its big customers want their cloud running Linux even if they have to do it themselves, MS better oblige, otherwise they risk losing those customers' business for good.

MS is being clever as usual. By offering Linux on its cloud, it is insuring that its customers will keep Windows. We will see how long this strategy will work before Windows is mostly replaced with Linux.

And by making the experience as much of a cock-up as possible, they can use it as anti-Linux PR.

I've often wondered why MS never put their own graphic and UI server on top of Linux, Ala Apple and OSX had done on top of BSD. Then, they'd be able to ride OS devlopment with minimum effort. Most of what they consider "innovation' is really just user space stuff. After all, Samba is just another running service on Linux, same with many other things... They could even "tweak" those things as a partial lockout, like they do now.



Nothing would change for MS under that scenario, except that the system would be a little more stable, but not so much that they would lose their support industry followers. After all, there would still be configuration issues, viruses (attacking only user accounts), and all the other issues plaguing the MS user space.

If you think about it, they had something like this with Windows 3.11, but took it behind the shed and shot it because they wanted to lock out competition. Win95 even booted in a DOS environment. Think about how much better from a technical standpoint their stuff would be if the GUI were a more modular component of their OS environment?!?! They were short sighted, and only looking to stiffle short term competition. Now, instead of selling two software components for each PC, they sell one.

JakeP --

I don't wonder why they never put it on Linux. That is self-evident: the GPL makes it a potential nightmare.

BSD, on the other hand. That would have made sense, a la Apple.

Quoting:I don't wonder why they never put it on Linux. That is self-evident: the GPL makes it a potential nightmare.

Especially given their business plan for the last decade+ has depended upon unquestioned copyright lawsuits.

Non-modular GUI seems like one of MSFT's biggest design mistakes in Windows, right after multiple-rooted file trees (C:, D:, etc etc), and magic device file names (LP, CONS, AUX, etc). It's pretty obvious that a separate "window manager" a la X11 makes everything substantially better responding and more reliable and configurable.

@dino:

I'm not in total agreement with the GPL thing. I understand how it could be a nightmare for them. But, with the right business model, and right system design, it wouldn't have to be that way. You could design a system that doesn't necessarily hook into the kernel, and still deliver a working environment.

@JaseP:

"Right business model" and "right system design" are unknown things at the corporation in question.

So is the knowledge that these are unknown things.

Well that's kind of my point, entirely ...

@JaseP --

But why even try when you can bypass the problem altogether. Everything a corporation does costs money and opens up potential liability. Linux would make no sense as the basis for Windows. At the very least, somebody would be screaming that Windows interacted in such a way that the whole deal had to be GPL'd.

No such problems with BSD.

@Dino,...

True, but they wouldn't have even tried that. They have this domination culture, and even design their products around it. My point is that they've had many chances to "play nice," redesign products around real improvements, and even diversify their product base to include versions that would be embraced by open source advocates (except for the hard core types), but have never availed themselves to that. It's almost bizarre in a way, because they originally started out selling tools to help mostly developers (programming languages, etc.) which includes the open source set.