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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.'"
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!
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.
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!"
Microsoft invented Ajax
You're a partner of Microsoft? haha! loser.
What did you expect?
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
>>I'd love to believe that, but at the time that the MS solution was first made, MS had even more of a control over the browser market than they do now, really. Many of their proprietary nonsense things ended up on webpages, and there's little reason to believe this wouldn't either. I'm not sure if it had XML support, though.
Microsoft released Interent Explorer 5.0 in september 1998. This was the first version to have the XMLHttpRequest object.
AJAX was possible over seven years ago.
That said, until firefox implemented it, I didn't even think about using it in web applications.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
"Partners", from Microsoft's perspective, has always just meant "learn from them so that you can do what they do better."
This is true since the mid-80s: witness Apple. They partnered until they learned enough to do it their own way, and then dominated the market. They've done it dozens of times since.
That you didn't see this coming really is your own fault. Do you think that Microsoft thinks it has "peers" in anything? No. They see themselves as the big fish in a big pond, and if you haven't been eaten yet, it's just because you're less tasty than the others. Your mere survival doesn't make you "friends."
If anyone knows this, it's Google. They've treated Microsoft as the enemy from day one, and rightly so.
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$tar -xvf
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
""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?