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Only Micro$oft would name their cloud platform after a cloudless sky.

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

azure |'a zh ?r|
adjective
bright blue in color, like a cloudless sky : white beaches surrounded by azure seas.
• Heraldry blue : [ postpositive ] a saltire azure.

I'd love to know how many millions of dollars the morons who dreamt this name up were paid. But my guess is it was Ballmer who came up with the name.

As for the azure platform, well as long as it stays Windoze only, you can count me out. In fact, even if they made it work with OS X, Ubuntu, Dream Linux and any other OS, I still would never put my data in the hands of a convicted monopolist.

I actually thought Azure was a very clever name. Better than say 'Nimbus'.

If you take it to mean that by using MS's Azure application, you will see only "Blue Sky" (think management buzzword), then by letting MS handle all the data / software side gives you the "Blue Sky" to continue to perform your business...

I never got the whole "Micro$oft" insult.

Oooh, they're successful! Cuts deep.

Microsoft is hated because it is a monopoly that has escaped being broken up by bribing politicians (it funds both Republicans and the Democrats in the US).

It has the power to crush any innovator (cf Netscape) by copying the innovation and distributing the copy with Windows possibly without charge.

After all this, the executives and programmers are so arrogant as to believe they are innovators acting in a competitive market.

So... Naturally I would LOVE to work there!

Not sure if I'm neutral but I am fairly ambivalent about Microsoft. Most of the things that they have been accused of (e.g. stealing competitors ideas and making them more successful) are common in all industries. The fact is that they developed a solution 20 years ago that has gone on to make them a vast fortune. On balance this is a good thing!

The anti-trust indictment was stupid, and MS could have defended it early on rather than let it develop for years, instead they buried a head in the sand let it get political.

My criticism is that they don't appear to have used the cash cow to sensibly innovate and develop their products.

As an everyday user I can barely tell the difference between Office 97 and whatever is the latest edition I'm using.

Vista didn't live up to the promise, and it is damning when following an upgrade some people still want to purchase the outdated version.

The most radical thing that they could do is to totally recode the entire OS so that it is 100 % reliable and hack proof (or at least less of a leaky sieve) and offer a proper fully integrated version of Office.

20 years on and all I want is something that doesn't crash so often, is that too much to ask from the world's (nearly) richest company?

No, Microsoft is hated becasue it is suddessful.

Just like every other dominant player in every industry.

Look at Sports. Manchester United, Michael Schumacher, New Zealand Rugby, Joe Calzaghe, Michael Johnson and Tiger Woods are all derided as much as they are supported. Their dominance polarises opinion between those who can see the good that they bring and those who want to see the underdog flourish.

Tescos, M&S, Ford, PC World, Ikea and McDonalds suffer from the same affliction. The only difference is that MS have been even more dominant and so feel the pinch even harder. Plus there is a disproportionate amount of MS-haters involved in Internet communications to make it seem even worse.

One of the reasons that Microsoft is hated is the arrogance with which they have exploited their market position and inspired other companies to do the same.

I still remember the shock of installing XP and discovering that Microsoft thought they had more rights over my hardware than I did.

What seemed like a plethora of services were phoning home to Microsoft without consulting me, over a net connection I was paying for, and threatening to lock me out if I didn't register.

It took time to wrest back some kind of control. Ever since then, if we wish to continue running software that's bought and paid for, we've had to accede to our hardware and software being audited, over our net connections, by a growing number of companies, whenever it takes their fancy.

On the basis that, 'oh no, you didn't buy it (even though you paid £400-£500), you bought a licence that we can vary at any time.'

To add insult to injury, every time systems get upgraded Microsoft 'eats' the difference, with additions to secure its products against attack and even promote DRM ahead of the interests of its paying customers.

Now they want to keep all their code on their servers and have a regular rental direct debit on our accounts, super for their cash flow, and be the gatekeepers of our data to boot.

I think it's great that MS are hated because it gives the rest of us a good laugh when the psychotic pond life that hate them for some pretty silly reasons crawl out from under their rocks to speak their brain.

I mean, sheesh. If you don't like a product then fine. Just don't get your panties in a bunch over it.

As for Azure, I like the name but I'm more interested in what it delivers.

Micro$oft is not an insult based on their success. It is an insult based upon money being their perceived sole interest, with scant regard given to customer service or product delivery. This is made worse that they focus the bulk of their better work at business users with home users seeing little of value.

This is perhaps slightly unfair, what I would say they are guilty of is poor planning. I bought a copy of XP and after running it for about 6 months I decided I wanted to format my hard disk and reinstall it, my activation code didn't work. A call to customer service sorted this out, however the reason given for it not working, "We didn't expect home users to need to reinstall" was pretty poor imo.

My only other complaint with MS is that their stuff is slow, unreliable, buggy, insecure and particularly with Vista, irritating to use. Can't prove anything but it smells a little of lazy coding to me.

This is all very well but you still need a PC with Windows and it's frequent updates to access the cloud.
Until someone brings out a stable, safe and cheap thin client this still has the same problem of having to update your access device

Rory,

Firstly, I just wanted to comment on how much I enjoyed your recent story on Cloud Computing on today's Six O'Clock news and also on the dot life blog.

The story on today's news was both informative and answered many of the concerns that many IT Professionals have, i.e. Where are the "cloud" data centers and how secure are they? Your video was great.

I also enjoyed the interview with Microsoft's Ray Ozzie. It is wonderful to see the Beeb leading in the coverage of technology stories. Can we please have more IT news on both the Six and Ten O'Clock news please?

Secondly, I would like to make a few suggestions to enrich [the viewers] experience.

1) In future, if an IT news story on the Six or Ten news is also on the dot net blog. Would it be possible to include a URL link at the end of your video segment? This will allow us to join in on the conversation online.

2) Please allow us bloggers the ability to embed your videos!! Your interviews are much appreciated and bloggers would like to embed the videos in their posts!

@rory

I don't know many home users who fork out for a full office licence, it is way overpriced for the product that you are getting, in my experience they are mostly broken into these categories

1.Maybe a bit tech savvy and so go for open office, and put up with it's shortcomings when compared to MSO
2.Get it included with their computer
3.Get it from mininova
4.Put up with works

I really still don't think that microsoft get why they have failed so badly with the internet.

They don't realize it should be us telling us what we want, not them telling us what we want.

The fact that they are still saying Vista is a great operating system and that windows 7 will be building on vista, and adding in a few pretty functions, shows that they are still thinking 10 years ago.

I use windows because Mac's are even more locked in than windows pc's and linux still isn't quite at the usability level needed for me to be able to use it.

As soon as it is, i'm off.

I just reread and I meant us telling them what we want

I'm going to start writing Appl€ and maybe Goog£€

...okay, so the blog doesn't do euro signs.