WINDOWS AZURE IS HOSTING WORDPRESS! IS IT REAL? OR JUST A LONG TERM GAME PLAN?

In this era, there are hundreds and thousands of companies providing their products built on Microsoft as well as Open Source technologies. These are either chargeable or free under GNU/GPL licensing.

Since its inception, Microsoft has been known for their chargeable products and has never launched a FREE product or supported them. IT seems they do not believe in the word FREE or they do not want to contribute anything to COMMUNITY.

But we will find it strange if a CAT is supporting a MOUSE. Surprised? Yes, Microsoft has recently announced that one of their recently launched products called Windows Azure^TM will Host WordPress Blogs. They have also announced that the users of Microsoft Office System will now be able to use the newest version of Microsoft Office (Office 2010) as a Blogging Tool using World’s most powerful yet easy to use Blogging Engine called WordPress. Though Office 2010 seems to be supporting several other Blogging Tools like Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, Type Pad, SharePoint blog, none other than WordPress is FREE to Download, Modify, Sell or Distribute.

If you look from the Business Perspective, Microsoft seems to be trying to enter into the FREE COMMUNITY WORLD by delivering small patches to the community, still keeping their reputation intact of a company selling all of their products/services for money.

As described by Microsoft on their Windows Azure^TM website, they will now support popular standard protocols including PHP. Please see below four lines from Microsoft.

 

“Windows Azure is an open platform that supports Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft® Visual Studio® expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.”

It seems that Microsoft might still act as an Industry leader of Operating Systems, Office Systems, and Database Systems, being an invisible part of an Open Source COMMUNITY.

Being one of the WordPress Services Providers, we are more than happy to hear that Microsoft is actually now supporting FREE products such as WordPress. IT will now be easy for the WordPress Services Providers to easily work on the services like WordPress Theme Designing, WordPress Customization, and WordPress Development.

Author: Nishit Patel

Nick is a professional web developer cum designer having vast experience in WordPress Services like WordPress Customization, WordPress eCommerce (Shopping Cart), and WordPress Article Writing.