If Google released an IDE with tight integration to Google Cloud like Azure + Visual Studio, that's a potential killer app that lowers the perceived switching cost.
If you told me to use Azure two years ago I would've laughed you out of the room. But here I am in 2016, using Azure, using ASP.net + IIS on Visual Studio. that's some powerful shit and currently AWS has cost leadership and perceived switching cost as their edge.
By introducing a layer of learning curve, you lock in your customers but eventually the other guys will race to lower that curve.
Those Azure gains only exist within a small space. Once you step outside the C# ASP.net sphere, their picture is no where near as rosy. Much of their offerings are minimal products for checkbox comparison sake.
When the answer to your tech problem is not ASP.net/SQL Server, you are going to find their services much more difficult to put up with compared to the competition.
Before someone jumps in with ".Net is huge in the X space" thing: There has been double digit growth of close to a decade now of platforms that don't run .Net. That ecosphere was a giant. Now it isn't.
And I will also add this - as a software developer today you are probably thinking about learning stuff like Solr, Hadoop, CoreNLP, NLTK, Spark etc., as you try to learn more about data science and related stuff.
As you do this, I personally think that you are much better off getting the JetBrains all-in-one subscription (if you can afford it) over continuing to use Visual Studio. There are a lot of things happening on the data science front which are just that much harder to do within the MS stack.
Actually I really love the C# language, and wish there were .NET ports for Solr, Hadoop and NLP libraries etc. But it just makes more sense to get into the native ecosystems for these libraries (Java, Python etc.) with the most convenient IDEs for those languages (e.g. IntelliJ, PyCharm) and not struggle with trying to get all your NuGet ducks in a row.
Doesn't Google already have a web based, but internal only, IDE? I don't know if that'd be easy to make external, but my understanding is that they've got a lot of internal users on it.
Yeah, and Cider was getting surprisingly good at the point I left Google (I was initially a skeptic). But so much of what made it good came from its tight integration with other internal tooling. I'd be surprised if it's ever externalized in a form that captures most of that value.
I haven't used Azure, so I'm a bit confused. Do you mean something with different capabilities than Google Cloud Tools for Visual Studio? https://cloud.google.com/visual-studio/
nice find! I didn't know about GCT plugin but yes that's more or less along the lines of what I expect from AWS.
However, Google Cloud really hasn't entered my mind as much as Azure has this year. AWS has always been there. I'm not sure as to why this is maybe I have built a perception that GCE is more expensive and my documentation experience with Google wasn't anymore smoother than AWS.
One thing for sure, Build 2016 earlier this year was one of the key driver for my conversion + Nadella's leadership.
Google Cloud has always been obscured by AWS and now Azure in my mind and so far, they've yet to really jump out at me like AWS does on HN regularly which Azure is now catching up.
What are the killer features of that tight integration for you? I use VS but run on other platforms with a fairly simple git push. Does VS have some other features beyond deployment that integrate directly with Azure?
Yes so deploying on Azure is right clicking the VS project and hitting deploy, it walks me through all the setup steps in one spot without leaving the IDE.
This takes a huge cognitive load off the developer who won't have to do context switching between portal.zure.com and VS.
But portal.azure.com is a much better, smooth, streamlined & intuitive interface than AWS, and I find myself wanting to work with Azure more and more.
There is still a stickiness to AWS and stuff like Cognito seems way more less intrusive from brand point of view (MS AD redirects you to onmicrosoftonline.com when logging in user)
> But portal.azure.com is a much better, smooth, streamlined & intuitive interface than AWS, and I find myself wanting to work with Azure more and more.
Ah, the interface that makes you scroll in all 4 directions on a small screen. I get slightly dizzy using it.
If you told me to use Azure two years ago I would've laughed you out of the room. But here I am in 2016, using Azure, using ASP.net + IIS on Visual Studio. that's some powerful shit and currently AWS has cost leadership and perceived switching cost as their edge.
By introducing a layer of learning curve, you lock in your customers but eventually the other guys will race to lower that curve.