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Microsoft To Enter Hosting Business
TM84 writes "InformationWeek reports on Microsoft's latest revenue plan. Within one year the company plans to offer hosting implementations of Sharepoint as well as CRM and ERP applications." From the article: "One thing is certain: Microsoft is exploring myriad ways to deploy and charge for software, ranging from subscription models a la MSN to easier ways for companies to buy incremental products not in their current Enterprise Agreements. Some industry observers liken the hosting move to the 'turn on a dime' shift that Microsoft executed years back when it discovered the Internet. When asked which other products and services Microsoft would host, another Microsoft insider said, 'Everything. Hosted Office. Everything hosted.'"
Looks like they do read Sun's press releases :o)
Hosted Office? Not from Microsoft thanks. I'd rather go with the power of Ajax.
http://www.writely.com/
Or OpenOffice. Or anyone. But not Microsoft.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Is it me or has Microsoft become highly reactionary? Google says they are going to start hosting things like databases and office applications on the web and *bam* suddenly Microsoft says the same thing. Mac OS uses the graphics processor and OpenGL to provide dazzling desktop effects and *bam* suddenly Microsoft says their next version of Windows will have the same thing. I'm sure there are probably many other examples. Can Microsoft not come up with useful new technologies on their own? Are they brain-dead followers blantanly copying everybody else's ideas?
Ouch! The truth hurts!
But then, we partners cant say "Hey, if we host you, we'll knock off 30% on that Open Licence Agreement". Thank you, Microsoft. If for anything, just for tossing a big FUD ball into the pool.
...with Hotmail and Groove (you can buy Groove services from them, rather than run your own servers). However, this does sound a little too much like its justified by "well, Google is doing it!", which isn't exactly true. Running hosted services is a difficult proposition, unless you can either quickly crank out SLAs or its all zero-admin. Its not something they've really done before, but I suppose it worth a try, since it will give them lots of experience in improving their admin interfaces for Windows Server 2k* as well as learning first hand the risks caused by the security holes in their products.
FINALLY
That's good because it's freaking HARD to get sharepoint installed and running. Especially together with Metastorm. It's useful and cool when it's running, but until then . . . ARGH!
Its going to see how many companies keep hosting on Microsoft products. Do they really want to use their competitors product ? Especially a take no prisoners competitor like Microsoft ?
The situation should be comparable to when pepsi decided to get into the restaurant business and handed coke a great marketing tool. And it now seems, that the only fast food places that serve pepsi are owned by pepsico.
It seems as though MS is trying everything they can to enter new markets to make up for their lack of growth options with the OS and Office markets. From the sounds of it, they are going to try and proprietarize this venture and I dont see what the advantage would be for most customers. I can see small companies with 100% outsourced IT possible trying this, but not too much else.
Anyway, to sum up, this looks like another example of MS entering a market too late to make much impact. Just my 2cents.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
What does this mean exactly? When I want to edit a Word document I have to be online?
"Microsoft's hosting push is expected to target the gamut of users--including small companies with five to 10 PCs and no dedicated IT staff--who may want to do things like share calendar items but not worry about how that is accomplished."
Couldn't an undergrad CS student develop an app that could do this for said small IT company.
~jennifer.k~
From what I hear, a lot of depts have trouble implementing these Sharepoint solutions and other things. If you could get actual Microsoft people to run these solutions for you, I think it would save people a lot of headaches.
Isn't this what a lot of other companies like IBM are doing anyway? "Heres your software. What you don't want to run it yourself? Thats fine, we've got this nice shiny datacenter here, we'll take care of it for you!"
Anyone else read that as everything hosed?
"Ozzie, the former chairman of Groove Networks, has been charged with leading Microsoft in this area." If only that was a criminal charge.
Elsewhere: "How much competitive advantage does e-mail give any company? Wouldn't those internal IT resources be better deployed elsewhere?" said one Microsoft source, who asked not to be named.
You mean, you won't need to buy email server software and support from MS?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
When asked which other products and services Microsoft would host, another Microsoft insider said, 'Everything. Hosted Office. Everything hosted.
But isn't that insider a newly hired, "lower-level business person" who did not understand the company's obligations ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Please join me in a prayer asking that the servers run BSD and Apache. I'd hate to see people's sites/apps/etc go down instantly.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
From the MS POV, it is very difficult to pirate a hosted app and makes it easier to enforce EULA clauses along the lines of You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services (FrontPage 2002).
Personally, I don't think that the company that allows "low level" employees to announce company-wide projects that violate anti-trust agreements without review by upper management can be trusted with confidential and sensitive documents that I create. But that's just me.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Of course if MS can provide Hosted Windows then Google could provide hosted whatever (GLinux?) and things would get interesting.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
They get warm to it, then it goes cold for a while. Then they warm up again.
The reason? Some new exec ( I'm guessing ) dreams up a way of sustainable yearly revenue, only to find that people's network connections aren't good enough yet. Sure, in the redmond area I'm guessing their inet connections are as solid as t1s, but the rest of the country is severely lacking in even enough bandwidth to pull this off, nevermind the reliability of the line.
This is an idea before it's time, and quite frankly, the implementation would appear to leave much to be desired. Not only that, but are still a ton of security considerations to take into account.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
We already know everything at Microsoft's hosed. Oh...HOSTED! That's very a different story. So basically, what they are saying is...they want to move to a model where they screw you over and over, and you pay each time you're screwed. No surprise they are moving to that business model really...Microsoft has always acted like a two bit whore.
If they don't pay attention and become competitor in the "normal" hosting business, Windows by hosters could share the same fate as OS/2 on PCs: Companies don't like to put competitor's products on their products.
I like the idea of hosted apps alot. I like it most for small (1 employee) to medium size enterprises (250 employees). Now that Fiber to the Businesses start to get some steam it is a logical step. If you're running a small to medium size company like a law firm, consultancy, factory, shop etc. the IT department is not the core of the business if it exists at all. Where it exists it only comprises up to 10 percent of the workforce which means too small an amount of people to actually have a clue of all the different branches of IT. (How many people do you know that have in depth knowledge of CRM, ERP, security, internet applications, databases, hardware, switches, archiving etc etc. You do know such a person? a SME can't afford her) So if you need several of these apps, you're in serious staffing trouble.
Outsourcing seems the way to go. Let a knowledgeable company or group of companies run and maintain your apps for you. However, who would you trust to do that? For general programs like Office, probably Microsoft or Google would be a good choice as any. For specialised/customized programs, like CRM and ERP, I would go for a 'local' guy that is approachable. I would most definitely not opt for a company that is as huge as Microsoft to run my customized programs, because I'll end up in Helpdesk HELL.
In my ideal world I would go to a company that offered me a subscription like model to a whole range of desktop apps (photoshop, acrobat, office, visio etc etc) and a company that runs my serverside apps and specialized apps) It could save alot of money on IT-people and specialized rooms etc. (And probably get me into trouble some other way)
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What about confidentiality, and security? would you trust MS to host your OS/office functions?
Microsoft are famous for their innovation. Look at the list of innovative products:
DOS,
Windows,
Visual Basic,
SQL Server,
Word,
Excel,
Internet Explorer,
Unlike software, which is usually paid for up front (and had no guarrantees), what will MS do to retain hosted customers after the next wave of BSODs/worms/viruses?
The service may have no guarrantees, but annoy your customers too much and your revenue stream goes somewhere else.
Now do I get those blue screens on a webpage??!!! Sounds Innovative to me!!
I imagine their EULA for the hosted stuff would be just like their Hotmail one in that the user completely indemnifies them if they lose all the user's files like what happened to some Hotmail users a while back. Mmm... One of the biggest arguments they use against GPL/OSS is that there is no one to hold accountable for it if something goes wrong-What's the difference here? Oh, you are paying for someone to not be accountable.
People are willing to pay big bucks so they can read email on their Blackberries. This could be an extention of the same idea. You have some kind of cheap network appliance(s), you can do your work anywhere on any of your various machines; desktop, pda, phone, Blackberry, etc. You don't have to worry about syncing anything to anything else. It would be very convenient. Imagine being in a meeting and never having to worry about a file that only exists back on your desktop. The boss (or customer) asks the embarassing question and voila, you pull up the file you need and answer him. This is not to say that I'm going to do it myself, but I know lots of other people who would.
another Microsoft insider said, 'Everything. Hosted Office. Everything hosted.'" .... before slumping face-first into his cornflakes?
Sounds like someone needs to lay off the amphetamines for a while...
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Yes, Microsoft's hosting partners are paying a bundle in licensing fees. But, they-the hosting companies-are making it back plus a substantial profit. This is just a classic cut out the middleman move. Microsoft will charge a bit less than the current hosting companies can and will will still make the licensing fees plus the profit that the hosting companies previously enjoyed.
The question for many of the hosting companies is whether or not Microsoft will enter their specific niche by introducing their own products or will simply purchase a company in the niche to get a jump start. A good example of this would be SalesForce.com or eBay. Actually, I look for both to be purchased by Microsoft. I think that SalesForce.com is already deep in bed with Microsoft and they are the leader in the space. eBay has to be looking over its shoulder with Google supposedly firing up a competitive service. So they both seem to me to be acquisitions that Microsoft could and would make.
It's good to see MS go this direction, but frankly, it's going to take 3-4 years to get enough experience to really run hosted service reliably. Not to mention, they'll have to hire and train a huge team of IT people to manage these systems on a day-to-day basis. Unless MS figures out how to get windows server to the point where it takes 1 admin per 50 boxes, they're going to have a nightmare on their hands. Coordinating thousands of servers with hundreds of admins is going to be a management problem.
MSN has always offered some kinds of hosting, but now they offer sharepoint as hosting. OK lets see here, sharepoint has been available for a long time. So MS offering their product that existed pre google ideas, as a host, which also pre existed google is copying. MS has been trying to get into software as a service, and when they launced sharepoint a lot of people figured that is where they were heading.
I guess it is slashdot, for every valid argument that are a million others that just dont make any sense. Oh but i do agree in general MS does copy things, but which company does not. If someone betters you better be copying and improving...
...Clippy!
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
You should take a look here:
http://my-internetpc.com/
Scott
I think MS is starting to see that software is becoming a commodity. OpenOffice may not be a better product than MS Office, but it offers a compelling alternative. Linux may not have a better desktop, but, again, it offers a compelling alternative. Both are free, both will, in time, be as pretty and feature rich as the MS alternatives. And, one day, you will be able to turn granny loose on both of them and have her be productive and not pester you for support. So, how is MS going to make money when free, good rival software becomes ubiquitous? By trying to see what they can put up on a "hosted" model. Although, with Web 2.0 (specifically the no-walled-gardens idea), I'm not so sure how they are going to make hosting work. But it should work for a moment.
I wonder when MS will get into the IT infrastructure outsourcing business to insure that companies use only MS server and PC software. I can see them out bidding companes and coming in, dumping all their mainframe and unix systems then replacing it with Windows based systems.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Geez you sound like all of a sudden MS is going to start testing their products or something.
During comdex 1999 (the 20th anniversary of comdex btw) Bill Gates during his keynote speach spent the whole session evangelising about how we were going to see a shift in the software ownership paradigm. He was refering explicitly to ASP based activities and at the time said they were going to start providing hosted applications that would be rented to users.
The following is cut n pasted from http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/11-14c omdex.asp
MR. GATES: Now I'd like to show another great new thing that's available online, David Jaffe is going to help us take a look at what we call Office Online, and this is a new way, just one of the new choices you have, of how you want to get at any Windows application.
MR. JAFFE: As you mentioned, that's absolutely right. As you mentioned, another element of choice for users is something that we announced earlier this week called Microsoft Office Online, which delivers Office 2000 as a service over the Internet. This provides even more choice for users in accessing their software and on any device. So, let's go ahead and see how this works. You'll see here that we have a Windows 98 PC and that there's virtually nothing on this machine other than the operating system.
Now, the real excitement of Office Online is that with just a user name and a password, I can go ahead and access the Windows 2000 desktop and all my Office applications via the Internet without even a single bit residing on my local machine.
(Applause.)
MR. JAFFE: Now, one key advantage of Office Online is that users can get the most up-to-date software without having to do a single thing. So, for example, if there was an update, such as a service release, the latest anti-virus software, or even a new expense report template, it can be updated automatically without the user having to do a single thing.
So, let's go ahead and check out our Office applications. So, I'm going to go ahead into Excel 2000. As you can see, this is the full version of Excel with all the tools that I'm normally familiar with, such as the Office Assistant, which allows me to ask my questions in my own words. Now, the Office Online has a number of interesting user support scenarios.
So, for example, say I'm a new Excel user, and I have no idea how to access the expense report template that was previously added. Office Online makes it possible not only for a support engineer to watch what I'm doing with my permission, but actually take control over my machine, and show me how to solve that problem. So, we'll go ahead and have my support engineer actually show me how to find this expense report template. So, you'll see, hands-free, it's going out and showing me exactly where my expense report template is. Now, this is a pretty simple example, but you can imagine the benefits that this will show with even a more complex scenario.
So, now here that we have our expense statement, I'm going to go ahead and fill out a little bit of information, such as my name, my Social Security Number, and my department. Now, suppose we had a power outage and my machine were just shut down without warning. Now, in the past, this might have been very problematic. I would have probably lost a lot of my data. With Office Online, this is not a problem. Now, I could go ahead and reboot the same machine or, in this case, I'm just going to go over and switch to a new machine, and I'll go back and log on with Microsoft Office Online, and I'll put in my password, the same password that we used before.
In just a second you'll notice that the expense report template comes right back up, exactly where we left it. You'll see that all the data is there, and in fact, even the question that I asked the office in this thing would still be there, as well. Now, what makes this possible is that the applications are actually being run on the server instead of my local machine. So we've recently seen how Office Online h
No need for local installs, just a web browser.
Would this mean the ability to run LiveOffice in any sufficiently advanced browser - on any platform? Would MS be so bold as to enable non-Windows/Mac users to use LiveOffice? On the one hand, they are extremely loathe to undermine the necessity of their flagship product: Windows. On the other hand, they must also realize that getting at least Office revenue from a Linux customer is better than none at all. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
This could be a lose/lose proposition for MicroSoft.
They have touted their system as being capable of "five nines" (99.999% uptime per year, or, only 315 seconds of downtime per year). As being cheaper to operate and less vulnerable than Linux.
If they run BSD/Apache as another poster suggested, they admit FOSS makes a better platform. If they run their own software they risk major loss of face if^H^Hwhen servers BSOD, hang, get infected.
It will a lot harder to blame admins for security issues when MicroSoft is the administrator.
Or maybe their customers will simply turn a blind eye to it all. Much as they have reliability and security problems in the past.
They're already running a lot of servers, so I'm sure they view this as an extension, the way that google looks at hosting videos and 2gigs of email for everybody. Once you start managing data centers that extensively, these "little" experiments are a lot less risky.
But, there's a big difference here. Microsoft sells development and server software and Google and Yahoo don't. If Microsoft competes with every customer they have, soon they won't have any.
I know I wouldn't partner with M$. Everyone is at risk. They own game companies and make hardware. They develop MSN messenger and Cluster servers. Do you understand how insane it was to take on Sony? They're like a rabid dog. No one is safe and this proves it.
...when one of Microsoft=hosted sites will be /.ed. That will be chears!
So, is this kind of like Napster's slogan: "Own nothing, have everything?"e lls_nothing/
f ault.mspx
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/27/napster_s
Microsoft is going to start renting out it's software online allowing them to change things at a whim and if you are late paying, they will pull the plug on all of your applications? Somehow, this doesn't seem to make sense for many companies since they keep their computers and software for many years. Just look at the Microsoft Assurance Program:
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/programs/sa/de
So far, there has been very little that has been useful from it. This program is the main reason why Vista will ship in 2006 whether it is ready or not. This program will be up for renewal starting in 2007 and no company is going to sign up again unless the OS was updated within their past term - that is a big chunk of their money. This is also the reason why I would encourage everyone to stay clear of Vista - they are going to push it out regardless of what is wrong with it because they will probably be sued otherwise by all of these companies.
Dear Customers,
We are happy to announce that, in addition to providing hosting services for our customers, we decided to integrate a first class security model on the server to preclude any hacking worries.
The system, as the front line ms system on your network, will also manage all security related matters - anytime an attack will occur, this system will be the first to fold! Because we implemented it so well, we can garantee that the system will then resist all effort to bring it back online, even if you have administravte access, protecting you from any mischief that can be tried by the evil hackers.
The use of the installation cd and quick call to our sales rep services will allow you to reinstall everything in no time and be ready for the next emergency, knowing you have a disaster plan ready with us, your partner, microsoft..
Contact your local sales....
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Hey kids, Over two decades I have supported and/or deployed UNIX, NetWare, Linux, BSD, DOS, Apple OS 6,7,8,9,X, and Windows 3.x/95/98/2K/XP/03/Vista. It is never so black and white. We may look forward to Google hosting OpenOffice, but this anti-Microsoft bashfest is very tired. Every ecosystem has examples of good (Apache, Ruby) and not-so-good (Kino). You don't like a product, forego it. MS is as free to host as Google (also a for-profit company) and I applaud the admission (finally) that fatter clients are not the only answer. Many thanks to Google for forcing the issue with AJAX dev. Ya ya, MS is usually derivative, but Apple copied Xerox-PARC, KDE and Gnome copy both. OpenOffice seems to dupe MS Office. PHP and ASP imitate one another. Imitation is flattery, profitable imitation business. If laws are broken, prosecute. Otherwise, like it or not, and I may not, smart capitalists often win. True of every open market. Many users may appeciate hosting via Microsoft, users who are not idiots but who are familiar only with Office and have better things to do than learn another set of tools which none of their coworkers or friends use or understand. I have tried my best to steer family members to OS X to no avail. Why fight this? I'm surely p*ssing in the wind, but get off those high horses already and smell the coffee - or talk to average users in orgs that deploy Windows properly. Better to give them what they want (Office, etc.) in a cleaner, more controlled manner than to force them to trash what they know and are comfortable with. Office without the desktop miantenance requirements? Bring it on!
--- take the red pill ---
Hahahaha. Quite. This is part of the reason that people are trying to make program problems chargeable to the authors of a system — closed-source systems and the flexibility of computers give people endless opportunities that don't fit into the normal laws for suitability of a product.
Say hello to my little sig.
More interesting question for me is why the sudden need for more revenue?
Is OpenDocument threatening that much to cut into their hold on people's data? MS Office is one of the two areas that don't lose money for MS. The lock they have on the file format keeps people buying MS Office. If they lose the lock, then they lose MS Office revenue. The lead developer for MS Office, Gagne, is quitting, that's got to hurt, too.
The other of the two is MS Windows. And that is nearly 100% driven by OEM sales, aka the sale of new machines with MS Windows pre-installed. New machine sales have been flat, flat, flat since right before the end of the dot-bomb scams. So far MS has been able to keep everything quiet about the deals with the OEMs to excluded or discourage selling non-Windows OSes pre-installed. The MIT $100 notebook directly or indirectly will put pressure on that. Only with a monopoly can it charge 80% profit margins, without a monopoly, the monopoly rents go away.
Also the company's stock has not been doing so great. How much of the company's revenue used to be from buying and selling its own stock or from activities like new issues of stock?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I see this more as a move to compete with Oracle. Not to put all the hosting companies out of business or even to compete with Sun. I think the overall tone is that the infrastructure MS designs to support this will allow them to host anything. Not necessarily that they really intend to host everything.
Face it, Sun has proven that they don't have what it takes to beat MS. And getting Google to sponsor their office suite isn't enough either.
They've been hosting this for a while. http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/online/web- hosting/hub.mspx
For 50$ a month, their service also comes with a dynamic IP.
WebDSign: thrust the Web by trust
they'll just buy someone who does
but you said so yoruself in a roundabout way...
This is exactly how MS operates. If you actually pay attention from initial product announcement, through Alpha, Beta, RC, and Final, the backtracking is simply incredible. If you look at what MS first promises and then what they end up delivering it's a fair assessment to say that every OS and many products they have released are total failures based on what they were really supposed to be able to do. They promise the world and then upon Final delivery have a product that doesn't accomplish 75% of what you were initially promised. They hype up the next release as the be all end all, and then quietly yank feature after feature from the real release. I don't know of any company that is as bad as MS at announcing vaporware year after year after year. I also don't know any company that is as good as MS at pulling the wool over everyone's eyes year after year after year. Never mind that the products are usually buggy for several product revisions. Hell with 2000 out of the box you had to wait for hotfixes to even get features that were "officially" in the product when you bought it.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Uh, I used to work for Microsoft. I think I know FUD when I see it. I dont hate the company, it just aint the company anymore that I worked for years ago. I dont see how Microsoft makes money on this, because customer service has never been their best weapon. I think this is all about customer lock-in, a familiar tactic. What I hope, is that they find a way to bring their partners along in this, and let us benefit from this initiative. But I aint holding my breath.
Until recently, I would have to say that Microsoft as a partner, has been 'berry-berry good to me', so to speak. This one caught me by surprise because I heard nothing about this at all. I guess there was just no good way to break this to us. The bad news is that they have probably destroyed the market until they flesh out what they want to do. Clients will just wait to find out the best way to go.
Aside from reliability speculation, think about where this would be needed.
Drasticly lowers startup costs if you need to supply a large number of employee's.
Bussiness's can scale much faster when experiancing rapid positive growth.
For places that always deploy the latest software this can certainly make things cheaper.
For linux only shops this can provide a windows box without licsense worries.
Whats needed now is a really thin client box, if ms can sell a sub $100 dollar box for access that will further increase the doability of this.
Its certainly not for me but thats not to say it will not be extremely popular.
Aside from all this its that full circle thing come back to haunt me again.
think mainframe computing
Some industry observers liken the hosting move to the 'turn on a dime' shift that Microsoft executed years back when it discovered the Internet.
By "discovered" they mean, "Ignored it until it smacked them over the head, forcing them to spin around in a circle (looking like they were turning on a dime), until they came to their senses and said, 'Hey, free dime!'"
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Wow, crackers and script kiddies around the world are going to oggle this kill and salivate.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
I run some sites, and trust me when I say its a complete ripoff.
GoDaddy may not be the best option for servers but for 500 Gb of bandwidth for $34.95/month and 10 Gb of space on their Virtual Server options, it sure beats the hell out of Microshaft, and I'm willing to overlook that they shut off the Apache service when the server load gets too high (I know someones literally watching the CPU load values because sometimes I can spike it to 10.000 and nothing happens and sometimes the apache service stops when the load is over 1.000).
I didn't even bother looking for their overage charges, but im sure they are astronomical as well. All it takes is a Slashdotting and you've already gone over your limit.
ATLAS is Microsoft's attempt to compete for some of the attention AJAX is receiving by integrating AJAX calls into .NET code.
Here's the history for AJAX:
Grammar Lesson: you're is a contraction of "you are"; your means you possess something; yore means days gone by.
So basically MS is becoming an ASP, aka Service Bureau.
"I know I wouldn't partner with M$. Everyone is at risk. They own game companies and make hardware. They develop MSN messenger and Cluster servers. Do you understand how insane it was to take on Sony? They're like a rabid dog. No one is safe and this proves it."
Why should they be? If roles were reversed? Would all these "partners" hold back, because it's taboo? Evolution isn't a "hold-back" methodology.
This reminds me of an old simpsons episode. Burns made a bet with another nuclear plant his baseball team would win in a baseball contest. Too win Burns hired several famous baseball players. Anyhow, somewhere in this episode Bart and Millhouse plays baseball at school. They are chosing teams. Bart picks one of the kids in school, Nelson or so. Suddenly Mike Scioscia or someone walks by. Millhouse asks if Mike wants to play in his team. He accepts. Now Bart (slightly annoyed) picks another of the school kids. Another famous baseball player walks by. Millhouse picks him. Repeat, and Millhouse team is full of awesome, famous baseball players, and Barts team has a bunch of kids.
Now, this is relevant if we by "Bart", mean "Microsoft", with "Millhouse" mean "Google", and with "famous baseball player" mean "good ideas". Is it just me, or are pretty much every single one of Microsofts ideas simply _bad_? Google comes up with an awesome idea. Microsoft figures out something imensly stupid. Repeat.
Have a look at WindowsCE-based thin clients like the HP T5500. I just bought one for $100 on eBay and it probably has all I will need to run hosted MS Office without the hassle of maintaining a Windows desktop. It can surf stand-alone, independent of any Terminal Server, via my cable/DSL router. It also makes a pretty decide RDP or ICA client and VT terminal emulator.
I would not recommend this for multimedia, games, or anything high-end, but for hosted Office or AJAX-type apps it should work fine, and it looks and feels like WinXP so MS junkies will be less likely to gag at the idea.
The biggest problem with Windows is fragile/buggy desktop configs. Yank the desktop, problem solved (mostly). My Windows Server 2003 boxes at work, home, and ISP godaddy.com have never failed me in over a year of regular usage. I avoid certain aspects including MS Exchange and heavy dependence on AD.
--- take the red pill ---
Look up, software appliance, ASP (aka service bureaus for you old-timers), and network appliances.
Basically the world is moving to "software as a service".* Be it hosting at a central site, remote access. e.g. ASP.
Or hosted at the clients site, remote maintainance and upgrade. e.g. software appliance
A network appliance sits in between the two. Kind of like "software appliance" on hardware tailored for the purpose. e.g. storage, spam protection, security, multimedia.
*This is one of the reasons the new GPL will be problematic.
Microsoft will initially pay hi wages to hire away expertise from currently successful web hosting firms.
To be honest, having to deal with incompatible systems all day long, a fully integrated solution for a manufacturing facility would be a godsend. Linking ERP, Time & Attendance, Payroll, Financials, as well as day to day backoffice stuff (email, etc) would be fanastic if appropriate controls were in place. MS hasn't been particularly strong with that regard.
Dealing with custom interfaces for all these interconnected systems sucks.
Sorry for misreading the article.
It reminded me of an old cartoon in the early days of the AOL MSN wars where Joe Consumer's latest computer indicated that it "works best with Microsoft House":)
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Makes perfect sense from the supplier standpoint. Low entry cost, easy to integrate additional services, locked in monthly revenue. But, this is a nightmare from the consumer standpoint. Can you imagine using a "Total Hosted Solution" where the Sales guy accidentally just deleted a bunch of iportant conacts (and don't tell me that this analogy never applied to you). Just try and get that data back without paying through the nose. Or even worse, imagine trying to use a 3rd party non-MS product. "Oops, that isn't supported!" Or what if you decide to go elsewhere .... just imagine the nightmare of trying to get the data out of a MS hosted site.
Short term = low entry cost.
Long term = grab your ankles.
""Hotmail, you know, the world's biggest e-mail system, is hosted by us [said Gates]."
Oh yeah, Hotmail. That's that big system they host on UNIX machines, isn't it?
As someone who is FORCED to use this worthless app in our office I can only say I would not wish it on the world in any way, shape or form. Once again MS is trying to insure that you only do business their way.
That's what I thought it said at first.
OMG
MS's move is about hosting enterprise applications (CRM, ERP, Sharepoint, e-mail) not Office or Windows. (Aside: I don't know how you would "host" an OS to begin with
Hosted enterprise applications are all the rage, especially because a small business can't afford a massive CRM implementation, but they can pay a per-seat monthly license fee. And if MS is copying anyone, it's Salesforce.com - not Google. Salesforce.com is a hosted CRM application (one of the three main applications the article mentions MS about to offer as hosted). Google currently doesn't provide hosting for any enterprise applications.
Microsoft is already doing this. They have every single application that you can run on a PC hosted remotely so that people can use it. And it is even on a distributed grid network. Some customers even have thousands of machines clustered together, and remotely manage them with gui-based client administration tools. The capability to add new clients to your existing cluster is already built in to all versions of Windows by default when they ship. I just wasn't aware that it was a feature...
Randy.Flood@RHCE2B.COM
Will their servers run Linux?
Meh.
Yer all a buncha whiners. I for one will never put my data in the hands of a 'hoster'.
I will never run any software that I don't have the complete master disk for, and I will never pay any subscriptions for software. I have all the software that I will ever need
anyway and there is nothing that has come down the pike from any of these monopolies that lead me to believe that they intend to improve my ability to do my business. All of the microsoft 'office' products have become bloatware filled with features I neither want nor
need but do in fact make the software features that I do want, like moving grafix on a
word processor page, obscure or impossible to use. What HAS come down is more and more
corporate spyware, adware, crippleware, DRM, CRM, RAT's, and other stuff probably more
secret. I cannot use any office product after Office 97 because all the documents have secret code that call microsoft for some reason kept secret from us to this day. They can all drown in their 'security', so called 'rights', and whatever. All I want is a
spreadsheet that works and games that are fun and a database that manages data. The
industry produced them in the nineties and they still work today as well as they ever did. Barring the hardware industry acting in collusion with the software industry to the effect of disabling old software on new hardware, I should never have to buy anything new. As for the internet. Screw em. All my business computers are electrically and radiologically isolated from the internet. Microsoft will never be
able to sell my sales contacts and bare costs to my competitors or to the Chinese.