Monitoring MSFT: Why Minecraft Matters; Azure Migration Tools, Calculators

Microsoft (MSFT) has acquired Mojang, the Swedish company that owns the popular indie game Minecraft for an estimated $2.5 billion. What does the purchase indicate about Microsoft’s strategy? What does it mean, if anything, for partners? And what other Microsoft news should IT service providers watch this week? Here’s the briefing.

First the Minecraft deal. While exploring virtual worlds composed of blocks, avoiding creepers, crafting tools and weapons, and killing Endermen may not initially seem congruent with Microsoft’s vision for business, Minecraft is a huge game on Microsoft’s Xbox and also on Windows PCs. But more important, Minecraft has attracted an enormous international following of tech-minded young people – people who could be future supporters of Microsoft’s platforms for games and for business. Theconversation.com calls the Minecraft deal the “first building block of Microsoft’s new strategy.” It’s not just an investment in a game. It’s an investment in the people who are the future of technology.

The article points out that Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella’s move to acquire the game company “is a carefully thought-out new direction for Microsoft and puts the company on an exciting path. The aim? To finally win over the hearts and wallets of a younger, trendier crowd, which has been plugged into Windows on their PC for many years.”  Next step for Microsoft: don’t alienate this savvy and passionate community. Mojang alludes to the response from Minecraft fans in its blog post here today, but reassures them that everything will be fine:

“Yes, the deal is real. Mojang is being bought by Microsoft.

“It was reassuring to see how many of your opinions mirrored those of the Mojangstas when we heard the news. Change is scary, and this is a big change for all of us. It’s going to be good though. Everything is going to be OK. <3

“Please remember that the future of Minecraft and you – the community – are extremely important to everyone involved. If you take one thing away from this post, let it be that.”

Azure Cost Estimator Tool

Back to the pure business-to-business side of things, Microsoft  has released its Azure Cost Estimator Tool to the general public, reports Talkin’ Cloud. Talkin’ Cloud says that the tool is an installable application that provides a detailed look at applications and services running on an on-premise IT infrastructure and then estimates the costs of running those same apps and services within the Azure public cloud.

Windows IT Pro reports that the tool was designed to support virtualization technology, too, including Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, VMware vCenter and ESXi, as well as both Windows and Linux physical machines. The tool is installable on Windows Vista and later Windows versions up to Windows Server 2012 R2.

Competitive migration tool for Azure

Microsoft has launched a limited preview of Microsoft Migration Accelerator for Azure, a tool for moving organizations from Amazon and VMware to its own cloud, Talkin’ Cloud reports. The Migration Accelerator tool, which will enable customers and partners to “seamlessly migrate physical, VMware, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads into Azure,” comes about through Microsoft’s acquisition of InMage earlier this year. Srinath Vasireddy, principal lead program manager for cloud and enterprise at Microsoft, noted that the new tool automates “all aspects of cloud migration” to make it easier to shift existing workloads into the Azure cloud.

Office 365: Third-party tool for security

Here’s another third-party tool for Office 365. Talkin’ Cloud reports that identity and access management platform provider EmpowerID has launched Office 365 Manager, a module for enterprises. The module lets enterprises extend their existing on-premise security and audit control model to the Microsoft Office 365 and Azure Active Directory cloud.

Anything we missed? Any thoughts on what we’ve reported? Share them in the comments section below.