Microsoft's old strategy of surround, starve, and destroy doesn't seem to be working against more aggressive competitors like Apple, Google and even Amazon.
Azure could be a decent server platform, but until Microsoft's intentions for that platform are made more clear, as right now with Ballmer in charge, nothing other than Windows, Windows, Windows is ever a sure thing.
Consider Microsoft's strategy to build the Surface and compete directly with the OEMs they sell through.
It's often hard to tell the difference between being a good friend of Microsoft and their worst enemy.
"Helping businesses move to the cloud is one of our largest opportunities. All the online services people use today — both from Microsoft and other companies — run on servers in datacenters around the globe. The volume of Internet services used will continue to grow as people connect to the Internet from more devices for more purposes — fueling incredible opportunity in our server business. Unique to Microsoft, we continue to design and deliver world-class cloud solutions that allow our customers to move to the cloud on their terms. For example, a company can choose to deploy Office or Microsoft Dynamics on premises, as a cloud service or a combination of both. With Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure and System Center infrastructure, businesses can deploy applications in their own datacenter, a partner's datacenter or in Microsoft's datacenter with common security, management and administration across all environments, with ultimate flexibility and scale. Our business customers tell us these capabilities are critical to harnessing the power of the cloud so they can reach new levels of efficiency and tap new areas of growth."
If their intention is to try and capture the Windows Server hosting market, then it's a risky bet. They risk alienating large Windows OEMs like Dell and HP that would be cut out of arrangements like this when customers start buying server services from Microsoft directly.
This is all well and good if you're a company using the Microsoft stack, but it doesn't mean they're as committed to making a platform-agnostic hosting platform like Amazon is with AWS or other big vendors like Rackspace are.
Azure could be a decent server platform, but until Microsoft's intentions for that platform are made more clear, as right now with Ballmer in charge, nothing other than Windows, Windows, Windows is ever a sure thing.
Consider Microsoft's strategy to build the Surface and compete directly with the OEMs they sell through.
It's often hard to tell the difference between being a good friend of Microsoft and their worst enemy.