Recently the Microsoft Data Platform blog published a piece on what drives Microsoft's vision. It's an interesting look at the ways in which data is being used in some businesses as well as the variety of types of situations that must be dealt with. There is this idea that the value derived from having lots of different data was once only used by specialized companies or applications. However today, it's being more widely analyzed and accepted by more businesses. Of course, the vision is that Microsoft can help those businesses.

In the cloud.

I know this piece is more marketing than technical, but I have concerns that Microsoft is not driven by what customers want and need, but is instead seeking to drive customers to their own tooling and offerings in the Azure cloud. While I do like many things about the cloud and think it has a place in the future of many companies, I also think that there are still lots of opportunities, as well as demand from customers, for on-premises solutions.

I worry that the focus of Microsoft, which can be tightly bound in one idea as they eye more sales revenue, is driven with the idea that everyone, and all applications, will some day be in the cloud. I can't see that in the future for many businesses, and certainly hope that Microsoft recognizes this. Otherwise many of our hybrid solutions that push some data into the cloud might be backed by PostgreSQL or some other platforms as the on-premises database.