That's because other organizations have gotten smarter about this, like Google: http://news.yahoo.com/revolvin...

There are things that Microsoft didn't do back then (ie, lobby heavily) that other organizations do HEAVILY now (even RedHat, surprise surprise) that landed them in a lot of hot water. The idea that Google is a fair and balanced organization that wouldn't have antitrust issues for promoting their own services is ridiculous if you look at it from the lens of what happened to Microsoft a decade ago.

I know it's popular to hate Microsoft at Slashdot but a bit of perspective seems in order.

Regulated ones. Archaic ones. Ones with a lot of legal issues. There are plenty of use cases, though most of them will be solved through contractual obligations at some point and everybody will migrate to the cloud.

There really isn't a market for IT Pros as much any more... everybody is turning more and more into a developer, and that's what will be needed to manage this type of stuff; DevOps and Developers. IT Admins are now a commodity.

It's a matter of risk vs reward. Yes, I might be locked into a platform but at the level I develop, MS and other enterprise cloud vendors can't just arbitrarily raise the price. There are enterprise agreements that have liabilities, timelines, penalties and a lot more in order to ensure that there aren't runaway costs. I know, because I've negotiated them with both AWS and Microsoft. Funny thing is, AWS does not agree to terms for large organizations that are any different for a startup, and that's great for small startups as well as AWS to keep their legal costs down (and those get expensive), but for large enterprises with a lot to risk it's not appealing to do business with them on that front because of the fear of arbitrary price raises for any platform type services they provide.

They are getting better since Azure is growing at a faster rate than AWS and they are keenly aware of competition, but I don't think that AWS will provide the flexibility an enterprise needs in terms of the legal and compliance aspect. Thus far since they are relegated to IaaS for the most part, it's a non-issue because competition exists to combat them on price, but as PaaS comes along as well as lock-in... it is much less appetizing.

I think that AWS' IaaS picture is more complete than Microsoft's, no doubt... as for deprecating APIs well, I'll have to put my tin foil hat on that because since .NET 1.0 they have managed somehow, to maintain most of their APIs with little deprecation. I don't imagine it would bode well for their business if they deprecated it for Azure, but you're free to believe that. On the point of PaaS being far from mature enough, I'd likely agree; except if you look at modern startups, most of those are written in microservice type architecture, that doesn't work on AWS at all. It works however, on Heroku and that's where SalesForce is making a killing (overpriced as it may be).

As for the Novell analogy well... I think you've got a little baggage with regards to MS that I'll try to let you deal with on your own. I don't care much for the organization who makes the software, I care about the right tool for the job. And currently, for most of what I do I use and am happy to use AWS. I'll continue using them. However for new development efforts where we look to write in a microservice architecture, then AWS is simply not an option and I'm looking at Apache Mesos, Heroku, Service Fabric and AppEngine. Now you may disagree with that and that's all well and good, but from the tone of your post I'll gather you're the "I hate MS at all costs" type of person that is rather common around Slashdot, in the 15+ years I've been here. Hey, that's cool. I've been in some extremes in my career and as I've evolved I've looked to see it for what it is, a hammer and a nail type of situation. Which hammer do I need? Depends on the nail and what I'm driving it into.

Whilst I don't put a lot of stock into the Gartner MQ... AWS doesn't even rank on the PaaS scale at all. The folks I spoke of though, MS, Google, Salesforce -- all have a strong presence.

It's the fact that they only focus on infrastructure. IaaS is their bread and butter and it's what keeps them running and going with companies that don't know anything better than servers and storage, to migrate their workloads (the peaks and valleys kind) into the cloud to save money and be agile.

The next generation is a step beyond that, and it's what Microsoft, SalesForce and Google are building for -- PaaS. The idea that you manage fleets of servers is an archaic one, and the next generation will be writing against an API that manages all of that for you. Azure's Service Fabric, Google's AppEngine, SalesForce's Heroku -- those are the future of cloud computing. It's also a future that AWS doesn't have represented at all.

I am a fan of AWS technologies in their current state and the problem they solve for. But it's a problem that takes EXISTING methodologies and infrastructure and merely replaces them. It does not help prepare for the next generation of developers who grow up with the idea that this is all a commodity and they just want their code to work and execute, and have a smart engine behind it figure out all the needs for their app (be it data, network, power, cooling, memory, etc).

In that sense, Microsoft is far, far ahead of the others and as developers start to change their tune in their practices, we'll see that uptick for Azure happen. In the meanwhile, AWS is a decent place to put your existing servers and storage type of needs.

Came here to say the same thing. I ran away from Plex, it's got all the marketing but none of the utility that Emby does.

And with a high price tag commands a lot of 'prestige'. Ever sit inside one? They are very, very mediocre internally. Also extremely unreliable cars historically.

I still don't understand why people buy them, but I chalk it up to an issue of more money than sense. Or they might be rappers...

By trying to silence the guy who tells you how to beat the polygraph (a useless test by all accounts, as far as the 'science' involved), they have basically told every torrent site to start seeding the way to do it online.

Thanks Government!

So you reference an article that's ten years old?

Not for nothing, and while there are plenty of ways to have insecurity in an OS... I think Microsoft's history especially as of late has been pretty good on that front. IE11 is a bastardized product and while I like the rendering engine because of how smooth it is and low memory, the browser is useless for me. If Edge can maintain that memory footprint, the smoothness, and add better HTML5 compatibility + extensions... I will give it a shot.

I'm not condoning it, but I don't really subscribe to Steam for the "ethics" of it -- I just want cheap games easily accessible.

If Microsoft can do that and provide some nice social tools to boot, then I will give them my money. Or GOG, or Humble, or anybody else. (thought the irony is with GOG/Humble is that they are usually Steam activated).

Or Microsoft's app store -- which is poised to compete with them in the combination of Xbox into their marketplace.

Will be interesting times, regardless.

Conversely, I really haven't had any issues with Origin's service either. And I play a bit of BF4 not to mention Mass Effect and some other games.

Granted my usage of Steam is far higher.

But this is a single instance where you don't. I don't either, for that matter. But the fact that when you do, or you might, that their customer service sucks beyond EA's... that's never good.

I think you misread it, then.

Valve is generally only interested in money. So I think HL3 is going to come, but it will come whenever it comes. The problem is that at Valve, Steam is the real moneymaker (even if they released HL3 tomorrow) and their focus is on the cash cow.

I never said Valve wasn't interested in making the game, I just said I'm not interested in talking about things that aren't here yet.