[dmix]

I've heard this come up many times today. I'm curious if everyone questioned the financial motives of Google App Engine when it first came out.

Then again the target market for Azure seems to be enterprise IT depts, who tend to be involved with proprietary technology, and not start-up developers looking for a cheap and efficient host.

[DenisM]

1. Yes, I did question it back then too. Google has since rectified their stance and published their pricing scheme. The paid service is not operational yet but it's a neccesary piece of inforation to plan the projects ahead. I have started learning pyhon based on that information (python is required for google's services) but did not commit the project itself yet because the ship date is still up in the air.

2. This is not true, they target several markets and among them both corporate develoers and web developers: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/corpdev.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/azure/webdev.mspx