Microsoft needs to step up its cloud game

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

As InfoWorld’s Ted Samson pointed out this week, Microsoft is intertwining Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and Windows Azure to help developers build multiplatform, cloud-friendly apps. And it announced a batch of new services and functionality for its cloud platform, including the extension of Windows Azure Mobile Services to support for Windows Phone 8. The move should provide easy cloud-based mobile application development for those loyal to Microsoft platforms. Microsoft even provides a store to sell these Azure-built applications. But something’s still missing from Microsoft’s cloud picture.

The core issue is that a company the size of Microsoft should be doing more leading and less following. All the technologies and services Microsoft annonuced this week for its cloud ecosystem were born, proven, and executed by other companies, such as Apple, Google, and Amazon.com. Microsoft is looking much less innovative than these competitors, and so it’s much less likely to capture and hold the emerging $50 billion cloud computing market…

So, I have a few pieces of advice to my friends in Redmond:

First, stop adopting the strategies of other successful cloud companies. Microsoft is hardly alone in having a WAID (whatever Amazon is doing) approach — Oracle and Hewlett-Packard are also cloud WAIDers. But to break out from the me-too pack, Microsoft needs to find its own path, including new cloud services that drive both developers and users back to Microsoft…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/microsoft-needs-step-its-cloud-game-206233