Why Is Microsoft Competing With Backend as a Service Startups?

The Azure Mobile Services look to be a first step for Microsoft to wrap up some of their Azure offerings in a nice little package with a bow on top. Azure goes very much beyond what's mentioned in this article. Azure is something like a mashup of Heroku, AWS, and App Engine. It supports java, php, python, anything you can run in an IIS process, and anything you can run in a Windows/Linux VM. And, the new management interface is HTML/Javascript, not Silverlight.<p>See: <a href="http://www.windowsazure.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.windowsazure.com/</a>

That table makes me cringe: "Azure" vs "BaaS Players"<p>Are we comparing Azure to ALL of the startups in the scene? What about features that one has but others don't. Is there even one service that the "BaaS Players" column completely and accurately describes? I literally don't know, and the article doesn't tell me.<p>My gut says this is like comparing the USA (or whatever single county) vs. "Europe" and only picking your favorite parts from each country, and shaking your head at the USA for not having all of these positives. In fact, however, no single country in Europe would actually have all those positive points, or even a majority (usually)

'It is worth noting that Azure provides a "dynamic schema" feature for the backing relational database.'<p>There are two different Azure table-like stores: SQL Azure, which is indeed a relational database, and Azure Tables, which are not. It's only the latter whose schema is dynamic in the sense the author means.<p>(Although I'm a Microsoft employee, I know nothing about the "Baas" product.)

What I find interesting is Azure Mobile Services was apparently built using node.js.

I read the article, it starts with a questions and ends with no answer. The only thing interesting was the info-graphic.

Go Kinvey!!!!