coopetitionWhat a wonderful new world it is! Or does this mean war?

Today both Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services put up blog posts outlining how they support Microsoft, maker of rival cloud offering Azure.

Google reviewed how it runs applications built on ASP.NET, the open-source web application framework developed by Microsoft. Users can create Compute Engine virtual machines from base images of both Windows Server Data Center 2008R2 and 2012R2. Once the server image is created, production workloads can be moved to newly available instances of SQL Server: Standard (2012, 2014 and 2016) and Server Web (same years). SQL Server Enterprise for all three years is forthcoming.

AWS revisited the topic of how to use the four most-requested Microsoft servers — SQL Server, Exchange Server, Lync Server, and SharePoint Server — on its cloud, though the use of management tool CloudFormation.

No news in AWS’s posting, but still — the degree of openness shown by both Google and Amazon is a testament to how they honor competitor’s customers and their choices of software, capitalizing on that where they can. Or does it instead reveal how they’d like to co-opt those customers, weaning them away from Microsoft onto their own clouds? Or a bit of both?

Microsoft may have made the most remarkable turnaround of all, today taking on development partners it once would have savaged.

One thing’s clear: the software industry sure has changed since the early 1990s, when cooperation was taken as a sign of weakness.

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