Guess what? It has been shut down by the end of 2019.
We're back on AWS now. We were (I guess) not an insignificant customer, paying around 8k €/month, with the prospect of growing significantly (which has happened in the mean time, but on AWS).
They still have the GDPR-compliant Frankfurt and Berlin datacenters. [1] I've not see any announcement about closing them.
[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germ...
Apparently they reversed their decision again, which kind of underlines what I said :)
No one said MS developed new services for years and years and years; they said they supported existing offerings for a long time, which they do.
https://hackernoon.com/microsoft-announces-the-end-of-the-ge...
https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/issues/14944
If you still don't believe me, please provide your public key or email address so I can publish a response.
Maybe it doesn't stand out: Microsoft Germany delivered the promise that US authorities are technically unable to access stored data. The "new" data centers were without that promise, making the USP obsolete.
> Existing customers can continue to use the current cloud services available today.
> Existing customers are not affected by this and can continue to use the Germany cloud without restriction.
You don't see any Windows Phones being sold, but they still years later being supported with security updates.
No one can possibly fault a business for stopping continuing development of an unpopular offering. It's when it becomes unsupported and leaves people stranded that the the real problems happen.
It’s a matter of visibility and what kind of customers own the products being shut down. From a PR perspective there’s a big difference between killing an enterprise product with few large customers, and killing a consumer product with many small ones. Even if the few complaints are louder, the many complaints around the latter would still totally drown it out. I’m sure they have analytics to know how many people still use Windows Phones and weighing the possibility of an outcry e.g. if all their unsupported phones got 0wned and they collectively took to Twitter about it.
Microsoft platforms most people think are long dead and buried still get maintenance updates years later.