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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!
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
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.
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 ..
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 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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
>>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
Nope, it's AJAX alright. The Atlas Client Script Framework is an extensible, object-oriented 100% JavaScript client framework that allows you to easily build AJAX-style browser applications with rich UI and connectivity to web services. With Atlas, you can write web applications that use a lot of DHTML, Javascript, and XMLHTTP, without having to be an expert in any of these technologies.
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?