Cloud Competition

Mary Jo Foley reported yesterday that Windows Azure will be renamed as Microsoft Azure.

Google Cloud just dropped prices dramatically. (Via @justin.)

We think cloud pricing should track Moore’s Law, so we’re simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85%.

The Amazon Web Services summit is Wednesday in San Francisco. It’s reasonable to expect some announcements then.

Microsoft’s Build conference (also in San Francisco) is April 2-4. Might be more announcements then, too.

In general I expect cloud providers to keep lowering prices and adding features. There are a bunch of smaller providers too. You can get an SSD server from DigitalOcean for $5/month. Heroku has free tiers. Etc.

I keep saying to Cocoa developers: if your app needs web services (including syncing), and you’ve been reluctant to learn this stuff and to pay for web services, it’s a good time to get over your reluctance and get to work.