May 24
P, as in Platform!
I had an excellent session yesterday with a distinguished (ahem) panel of judges to try to cull some of the entries in our Australian Windows Azure "My Concept Rules" contest down to a short-list of finalists. Now, I'll say right at the outset that the entries were almost all excellent. There was not an insignificant amount of doubt expressed by some folks around here that there wouldn't be any good ideas, so I'm glad to prove them all wrong! The entreprenurial spirit is coursing throughout the land, and I can't wait to reveal the finalists and award a winner (happening, incidentally, at next week's hive of tech hotness, REMIX11 (http://www.noisetosignal.com.au/remix/). But I'm going to leave the specifics about the entries aside for now (I'll post some details about the winner and other finalists after next week) to muse on something that I noticed in reviewing the entries: very few people have any idea what PaaS give you.
Depressing thought, certainly, for someone charged with growing our Azure business! But I'm afraid it's true. We had a field on the contest application asking what about the application idea made specific use of any of the attributes of the platform and, with all but a few exceptions, the answers focused solely on simple elasticity: my app will start out small, but will grow to be used by millions once word gets out there and Azure will allow us to scale to meet that demand. A fine attribute of Azure and other PaaS offerings, surely. But hardly the only benefit! Almost all of the entries looked just like any web application that could have been built in 2003, only hosted in Microsoft's datacentres instead of with some traditional hosting company. Eliminating the up-front capital expense of servers and traditional hosting for a startup is great, but come on! We need to move beyond PaaS as just an elastic web hosting environment!
What I was hoping to see in the entries was much more around the unique attributes of "the cloud." I hoped to see more ideas that could leverage high on-demand processing power (like the very cool LuxRender from NZ-based GreenButton http://geneious.greenbutton.net/apps/luxrender and http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=4607 on Azure). Or what about leveraging the Azure DataMarket (https://datamarket.azure.com/) and some of its great collections of statistics from the UN or the European Environment Agency, or everyone's favourite US Crime Statistics (https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/c663117f-db6d-49e1-bc83-b05390bb3c70)? Azure has a killer CDN to let you cache static application objects at strategically placed locations around the world: surely that could change how you build apps! Or, how about hybrid apps that bridge the on-prem world with the cloud? The new SQL Azure Data Sync (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/sqlazure/datasync/) preview is hotness of the highest order!
Now, to avoid turning this into an advertisement for Azure (but feel free to sign up for a freee trial here http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/free-trial/ hehe), this condition, this treatment of the cloud as some sort of next-gen hosting environment, isn't just an Azure problem. Many other PaaS offerings have similar features and also seem to struggle to get users to think beyond the same kinds of web apps that we were all writing with CFML in 1998. It's our responsibility as PaaS vendors to help developers understand that PaaS is not app hosting. If you want that, there's plenty of great hosting partners out there. PaaS, Azure anyway, needs to emphasise the 'P' far more! It's a new platform for building applications, a new environment with new capabilities for a new decade. As a marketer, I'm failing as long as our contest entries fail to recognize that.
