Reply to post: Re: "why not try for devotion?"

Re: "why not try for devotion?"

Maybe we aren't. Everyone has different things that matter to them. Microsoft is catching up in some areas (containers, for example) but is at par in most places and completely wrecking the competition in others (hybrid on premises/hosted/public self service virtualization a.k.a "hybrid cloud").

Let me be perfectly clear here: while Microsoft may be behind on individual features with individual products very few companies have the hybrid infrastructure, automation and orchestration capabilities of Microsoft. Fewer still make those capabilities as easy to use.

Openstack is possibly more comprehensive than Microsoft's stack, but is harder to use. (Which, given how horrible System Center is, is saying something.) ZeroStack is a startup that removes a lot of the installation and configuration headaches for Openstack and provides a decent user experience, but they do so through a SaaS management plane riddled with data soverignty concerns that they don't seem to care to acknowledge, let alone address. There are a handful of other Openstack offerings that might be useful one day, but aren't quite there yet.

Yottabyte has a hybrid cloud that isn't as feature rich as Microsoft's yet (they're missing the app store) but is otherwise fucking spectacular to use. Sadly, they're too small to be a real threat quite yet.

VMware has all the pieces of the puzzle, but they cost a mint, are crazy hard to install and even harder still to use in concert. (How the hell do you make something more miserable than System Center, I ask you?) VMware does the basic virtualization quite well. They even do basic hybrid cloud in an almost usable way. But they are completely worthless at automation and orchestration. Which is why they only have a handful of customers for those software layers.

Cisco has a complete-ish offering based on Openstack, but they are still putting the pieces together into something cohesive. They'll be a threat in a few months, if they don't flub it.

IBM's Softlayer can be pretty awesome, but nobody can afford it.

LOL, HP.

Beyond this I could start putting together stacks of software and they'd amount to what Microsoft has, but they'd be almost a dozen vendors. Almost all of which are startups that may or may not be there in two years.

So, for my money, Microsoft have some great technology that is better than most of what is on offer elsewhere. At least on the infrastructure side. Unfortunately, they're liars and scoundrels. Even more unfortunately, they're terrible at UIs and don't even know it. They measure themselves only against other large software vendors, all of whom are also terrible at UIs. But there are a whole bunch of startups out there who are great at UIs, and they have some compelling offerings on the table.

The next few years will be interesting, but for Microsoft I think it will mostly be with them serving as an example of how to get everything so close to right but not quite get the cigar.