It was more than 20 years ago when Microsoft executive Paul Maritz coined the phrase “eating your own dog food,” beginning a long tradition of Microsoft proving its products are good enough for the world by using them in Redmond.
“We are dogfooding this product” has become a common, if unappetizing phrase muttered every day by executives and marketing types from nearly every IT vendor on the planet. But nowadays Microsoft itself rarely needs to convince customers that it actually uses its major cash cows, Windows and Office—after all, no one really expects Microsoft employees to run Google Apps on a Mac or Linux box.
But Microsoft still has to prove that Windows Azure, its new cloud service for deploying and hosting Web applications, is reliable, safe, and ready for enterprises. That’s where dogfooding comes in.
