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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.'"
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.
What have OSS developers come up with on their own lately?
What exactly is wrong with implementing a good idea, regardless of who came up with it?
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~
"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
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"
MSFT pioneered AJAX..not google...Outlook web access ..money etc were one of the first apps on AJAX ..
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)
Use Adsense for Charity
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.
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.
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.
Over promise... under deliver, remember? This is the Microsoft way. It's not plan well and then have a well structured launch. First they make promises and then they work on delivering. It's been this way with almost every single one of their products. They see someone making alot of money making a product and say 'me too! me too!' and then make loads of promises and lots of hype and then when it's delivered, the product only has half the features they mentioned and doesn't work well at all until at LEAST the third version. Did I just describe every Microsoft product? OOps.
Nothing new here.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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.