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Doug's Mailbag: IE 9 -- Too Little Too Late, Azure Price May Be Too High

One reader responds on why he won't be giving the newest version of Internet Explorer a chance:

Are we on a pilgrimage in search of some browser Nirvana?

I'm sure IE has improved, but what is gained by switching yet again? Microsoft is finally observing security and standards (somewhat) so should I leap up and down with joy? It's just Malibu Stacy with a new hat, for Pete's sake!

I may have to write apps to please all those other browsers, but my personal search for browser perfection is pretty much over. Firefox does what I want and is consistent and it isn't Microsoft or Apple.

Unless Microsoft is going to pay me to try yet another browser that will just end up as buggy and insecure as its last incarnation, I'm done. I'm sure the new IE fine. In fact, I'm sure it's great! But switching browsers is a serious time bandit and my time is worth more than whatever earth shattering changes they've stolen...I mean, finally come up with.
-G

Here's what one reader thinks of Azure's recently released pricing model:

I'm fine with the "per gig" price model, although $10 per gig seems a little high. To me the big unknown (huge unknown) is the fees to read and write to the database. Even if those fees are very low per transaction/per megabyte of data, I think you could easily end up with a huge bill at the end of the month.

Let's say you have an online catalog that is stored in an Azure database. Do you really want to pay Microsoft (or whomever) every time someone looks through your catalog? Think about how much Amazon would pay every month if their data was in Azure! Barnes and Noble would hire people just to run Amazon searches all day just to run up Amazon's cost!

I understand their concern with bandwidth and other resources getting consumed with no consequences, but I would rather see bandwidth limits or something similar. I don't have a good answer, but their answer makes me still shy away from Azure storage.
-Joe

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Posted by Doug Barney on June 28, 2010


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