Cross viral contamination is always a possibility.

Buy a ms product and expect not to get shit on? Ah, come on! W phones should come with toilet paper.

Sure they *can*. Anyone *can*. But either they have to rebuild and redeliver the app to do that, assuming the devices pull the content directly. That buys them an hour or two before someone notices. Or if its fed via ms infrastructure, then its even easier.

Sure, why not? Tis better to fuck than be fucked. And MS has done plenty of fucking already.

Really? Presumably via request headers or other fingerprinting techniques. If they wanted to be real jerks (like remember when MS required an IE user agent string just to access microsoft.com?), they could just start disallowing this traffic now.

... but this is Microsoft.

I totally agree. If you at the point where you are needing / wanting node and the like, then spin up a linux image, and install whatever you want. You don't need a traditional hosting company at all. The cost of AWS is negligible in this scenrario (and free for a yr as mentioned), the benefits are great, assuming you have the wherewithal to install and play with stuff like node.

Netfix wants something closer to "platform-less". Its not about today, or "anytime soon", its about tomorrow and all those things that no one can predict what will happen. Look at what the iphone did .... changed mobile, killed flash, put a major dent in MS's plans. Nobody could have predicted that impact. Why support platforms? Support a technology that is supported by all current and future platforms. Maybe tomorrow I'll be in a driverless car, hit autopilot and watch a movie (via netflix). Maybe my TV will start to do cool stuff because Samsung created something linux based and then has TVOS. Who cares about the OS? html5 does not necessarily solve all that (yet), but its the right direction. Proprietary stuff does not survive in a truly open arena like we pretty much have.

Yea, makes a lot of sense ... they are coming out with a new technology to support exactly the same platforms they already support. Great business strategy.

Yea, but its from Microsoft.

Yea, but its from Microsoft.

Any of the cloud providers are great for this. You can start with a free micro image from Amazon maybe during development phase if you have to start dirt cheap, and go up from there. Any of the cloud providers will let you scale as far as you need. That part is a no brainer. "Thousands of users" is a little vague. Depends totally on how many of them are active at the same time and intensive is what they are doing. I would think potentially something like a small 1 gig image might handle this in the low end scenario (not everybody interacting simultaneously). That does not sound scary. What ever development stack you are most comfortable with should work. I don't see why Java would be a bad choice. Its probably not the first choice of many.

There are a lot of checks and balances to make sure that all those that donate money to one cause or another, are taken care of. And that takes time.

Wrong again! It wasn't just the "free" part (I believe the low end Netscape Navigator was also "free"). It was the fact that they bundled IE with the OS and claimed it couldn't be separated . And there were allegations that MS was strongarming OEM's with like "Don't include netscape, and you must include IE, or don't be surprised if your license fees just happen to go up".