Submitted by Microsoft is preparing to launch a new persistent virtual machine feature on its Azure cloud platform, enabling customers to host Linux, SharePoint and SQL Server there . . . To date, Microsoft has been balking at customer requests to add persistent VMs to Azure, hoping to get customers to develop Azure apps from scratch instead. But the lack of the ability to host apps like SharePoint and other third-party business applications with persistence was a deal breaker for a number of business users who were unwilling to consider Azure until Microsoft added this support, one of my contacts said.
http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/12/15/growing-up/
I suppose that some people will say, “Hey, this is great news that Microsoft is doing this.” Well, maybe it is, maybe not. Microsoft has a long history of trying to make their competitors’ software run worse than their own. The most notorious case I can think of is when, back in the 1990s, DR-DOS came out and Microsoft made sure that Windows 3.1 would crash under DR-DOS but not under MS-DOS. That led to a long lawsuit that Microsoft eventually settled – details are secret, but the amount is believed to have been at least US$155 million:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/news2/microsoft-settles-dr-dos-…
Microsoft didn’t make the mistake again of making their competition’s software crash, but rather just made sure that it ran slowly. That was the issue with software suites – Microsoft Office was guaranteed to run faster than other similar programs because it loaded some of its code into memory on boot-up, an advantage no one else would have.
So I will not be surprised if it happens again. Microsoft might “support Linux” as long as they can cripple it.
Considering that Azure is not even a blip in the cloud and Linux along with VMWare pretty much owns it.