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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.'"
I noticed the same: all MS seems to do lately is flail about blindly attacking fad after fad to make money. It seems to be a lack of vision for what the future holds so they instead chase after every rainbow for that pot of gold at the end.
Of course, with billions in the bank and their core businesses still sucessful - they can afford to do this. But for how long? I doubt with this (lack of) leadership, they'll innovate anything in the next 10-15 years. Though the one big sucess with this tactic was that they had was the Xbox, though I argue that this was a natural outgrowth of the PC/OS business, but at least they have a decent games division for it.
The reason they do this is mentioned previously: cash in the bank - it wants to flow places and be put to use. However, I think Google has the better idea with employees playing around in their spare time and from that new business ideas get implemented.
I'm sure enough people at MS are just as smart but the management is stifling them because they are too scared and want to protect the core businesses. Thus any 'new' business ideas are reactionary - the managers are reacting. Not acting on their own initiative.
Did you mean: A bulletproof OS kernel with 1% market-share?
You're telling me, brother! We have a similar situation (about 10-15 "real" users in the whole place). Our needs are actually very simple, the primary one being a shared contact/customer list for email and phone purposes. However, the boss wants the "latest and greatest" from Microsoft. Oh, well, he's paying for it...
Dark Reflection
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
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