Yeah, Google apparently uses Digg as its CRM system.

I like the effect of competition on Microsoft.

My experience with working in academia was that I created some software with big ideas, almost laughably poor quality of implementation, and which (mostly) ended up filed away with a grant application which has been forgotten by probably eight of the ten people who know it exists.

My experience with creating software in the Real World has been that I do mostly boring things with periodic flashes of insight, that in a period of five years I went from being useless grunt labor to actually making meaningful decisions (almost enough time to be allowed to tie your own shoes in academia without a PhD supervising you, as long as you give all the credit for the shoe-tying to the PhD who isn't supervising you), and I can point to actual people whose lives are measurably better for me having done the work.

(Among them myself, since I no longer make $12 an hour. Not that us Japanese salarymen are rolling in it, but it is a pleasant change to not worry about how I am getting home for Christmas.)

Sadly, my ability to express this comment in the form of a witty stick figure sketch leaves much to be desired.

I work for Windows Azure. I'm going to try hard to not make this into a marketing thing. I want to clarify a couple of things from the blog post

- The web platform installer is really quite distinct from Windows Azure. The WebPI is a nice installer which gets all the right SDK+ tools installed to get you up and running with MSFT's web dev stack Windows Azure can run any code that runs on Windows Server (with caveats) and it just so happens that the webpi is a nice way to get something running.

- Windows Azure isnt really MSFT-stack specific (.NET/IIS) though that works real well. There was a bunch of content at PDC this year on how to run MySQL/memcached/php/python/RoR/whatever. Matt Mullenweg did a keynote demo running Wordpress on Azure for example.

- The blog post 'Microsoft is taking applications but in reality, you can just go and sign up and get a token in a very, very short time. After January, the platform billing kicks in so anyone can sign up anytime.