In all honesty, Microsoft has not always been loved by us, the users or the developer community.
“At the height of its monopoly power over the internet, Microsoft had an incredible 94% marketshare. It used this marketshare to seriously slow down the evolution of the internet, as it continued to perceive it as a threat to the Windows and Office cash cows. And it worked. They really did slow down the evolution of the internet, and even disbanded the IE team, once total domination was assured.” – David Heinemeier Hansson
It wasn’t all peachy under Steve Ballmer. Microsoft’s brutish tactics managed to turn an entire generation of developers against them.
But back in 2014, when Satya Nadella took over as CEO and made a bet on the cloud and open source, things started looking more optimistic for the Redmond giant. Microsoft is now one of the largest organizational contributors to the Linux kernel, they bought GitHub in 2018, open sourced the new generation of .NET Core in 2016 and authored and open sourced one of today’s most popular developer IDEs, the Visual Studio Code. Microsoft was being nice to the developers again and it showed.
I picked up the alpha version of .NET core back in 2016 when tasked with rewriting an enterprise application at a Microsoft ISV. It was fast, it was efficient, it was cross-platform and it was brand new and shiny. I was hooked despite the alpha stage and lack of packages. Obviously, there was no promises this would become the best pick for enterprise apps down the line. It still had to prove its worth, stability and adoption. Fast forward to 2020 and .NET 5 was then a stable platform aimed at unifying the fragmented .NET ecosystem into a single, cross-platform framework. It marked the transition away from having separate tracks like .NET Framework, .NET Core, Mono, and Xamarin, offering developers a clear, consolidated path forward under a unified .NET 5 umbrella.
And with this excitement as .NET fanboys, Indigo Labs was born in 2021. We felt there was an opportunity in the Microsoft ecosystem of partners and ISVs. While Microsoft was able to transform itself into the new era of distributed cloud computing and today AI, many of its partners were struggling to match that speed of innovation and progress. And there are over 400.000 of them worldwide! Our mission has always been to assist these companies with cutting edge skills on top of the .NET and Azure ecosystem, allowing them to step into the era of cloud computing, global reach, scalability, multitenancy and today AI, with the help of our teams.
Having invested in Open AI, Microsoft now offers one of the best suite of AI tools we’ve been using, especially if you need to deploy AI in non-english speaking countries. Microsoft Cognitive Services, now called Azure AI Services, offer some of the best AI tools for processing smaller languages like Slovenian or Swedish which is what we most commonly do.
Fun fact: Did you know that ChatGPT is built on Azure using AKS for container orchestration, Azure Blob Storage for user and AI-generated content, and Azure Cosmos DB for globally distributed data?
It has been an odyssey, requiring many projects, Azure usage, client referrals and 6 Azure certified employees to get here but finally here it is. We are super-proud to announce we have obtained the Microsoft Solutions Partner designation in the area of Digital and App Innovation, while the second one for Data and AI is very soon to follow.
This is a testament of the quality work and effort we have invested into helping existing .NET teams at various SMEs on one end, and startups that needed full engineering teams on the other, leveraging the Microsoft for Startups programe. Kudos to the entire Indigo team!
And this is just the beginning. We promise to stay on the cutting edge of technology and continue to provide our clients with innovation and excellence as a stable and reliable software partner!
