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Microsoft Spends $9 Billion On Research, Focuses On Cloud
superapecommando writes to share that Microsoft appears to be going all-out on research in the coming year, with a great focus on the cloud. They're supposedly planning to spend $9.5 billion in R&D; that's $3 billion more than the next-closest tech company. "'Especially in light of the tough difficult macroeconomic times that we're coming out of, we chose to really lean in and double down on our innovation,' [Microsoft COO Kevin] Turner said. Turner contended that Microsoft has more cloud services than any other company, ranging from its consumer email service to hosted enterprise products such as its Dynamics CRM (customer relationship management) system to its Azure cloud operating system. 'We're going to change and reinvent our company around leading in the cloud.'"
"...We're not sure our OS and Office monopoly will last forever, so we'd really like to see if we could actually turn a profit on something else."
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Microsoft has gotten very pathetic. They're investing billions researching a near-meaningless buzzword? Talk about grasping at straws.
Has anyone checked to see if Microsoft has trademarked the word "Cloud"?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Research costs Microsoft about $700M a year, probably less now after the recent belt tightening and layoffs.
R&D means everything that's involved in creating products, including developers, testers, program management, management, non-sales executive pay, etc, etc., and yes, research as well.
Azure is definitely interesting... It's distributed programing model does look to have some advantages. But I think it won't take off like Amazon's has for a few reasons...
First off, there are no computing containers. What I mean by that is you can only run applications on Azure, not whole operating systems. This does have some efficiency gains (in that you don't have an added OS layer in the middle, but it VASTLY increases the tie-in to the system, and prevents you from doing simple things like adding a server template to turn on if your site gets a lot of load.
Second, It requires applications to be custom written for the environment. You can't trivially port a ready-made application from a single server to Azure... While this is good on the efficiency side, it's not good for the weekend warrior or small businesses who want to remain portable and flexible...
Third, it's only on their cloud. You have to trust MS's infrastructure. And you need to trust MS with YOUR data... It's not like amazon's offerings where clones have popped up that are compatible (so you could recreate your own cloud if you wanted to, or use a competitors)... So that locks you in to their system. My guess, is that most sizable companies won't like this at all...
I'm not saying people won't use it. I'm not saying people won't like it. What I am saying is that it is not playing in the same field as the other "Cloud" computing platforms. IF MS opens up Azure (at least in a binary form) where you can install it on your own infrastructure, then it may have a shot. If they allow guest operating systems, then it may have a shot. But without both, I think there's just too much tie-in to be comfortable (and base your business around)...
Disclaimer: This is based on a presentation which I attended by the lead engineer for Azure back in December of 08. Things may have changed since then, but I haven't kept up with it specifically...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Watch /. tear apart Microsoft for even mentioning the word "cloud". /. was praising Ubuntu working on the "cloud".
When just yesterday
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/03/03/1947235/Ubuntu-Desktop-In-the-Cloud
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
China.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
We're going to change and reinvent our company around leading in the cloud.
Going to lead in the cloud? Given that Google, Microsoft's most-direct competitor, has been "in the cloud" for quite some time, as the expertise to innovate and excel, and has the money to ensure they have everything they need, I find that to be a bold prediction founded in whimsy rather than fact. Methinks Microsoft is about four or five years too late to the cloud computing game. Sure, they have the resources to make up a lot of time but they're competing against a company that has similar resources who already has those four or five years (or more) head start.
That said, it is nice to see Microsoft recognizing that the world has changed and making efforts to change with it.
(And, no, that last part wasn't me being a smartass - I'm actually serious. It's a good thing when major corporations recognize the world has changed and adapt accordingly rather than attempting to hold on to a bygone era.)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Gates is as fearful as he is feared, and these days he worries most about the Internet, Usenet and the World Wide Web, which threaten his software monopoly by shifting the nexus of control from stand-alone computers to the network that connects them. The Internet, by design, has no central operating system that Microsoft or anybody else can patent and license. And its libertarian culture is devoted to open--that is to say, nonproprietary--standards, none of which were set by Microsoft.
Gates moved quickly this year to embrace the Net, although it sometimes seemed he was trying to wrap Microsoft's long arms around it.
I remember reading Gates' book "The Road Ahead" something like seven years ago and being surprised at how wrong he was in his estimation of the impact that mainstream Internet connectivity would have. I wish I could get the exact quotes, but there were a few telling sentences where he comes off pretty clearly as dismissive that net connectivity would become anything more than a cute PC accessory. I'm still not sure if that was his genuine line of reasoning, or of it was just wishful thinking, but I think the point was clear that Microsoft was stacking their chips against net-based services, insisting that locally-run software was going to be the way of the future.
Now they are investing in what Google has already been doing and doing well for years, following their trend of copying other business' models instead of innovating on their own. I'm sure this will work out well for them.
Ballmer gave a talk at the University of Washington on Microsoft's cloud strategy: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/cloud/videogallery.aspx
MS should set that up in Dharamsala, up in the cloudy mountains. I can just imagine the synergy with Tibetan monks humming away.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
They spend over 9 billion dollars on research, and we still need to buy add-on products to protect us from virus attacks.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
How is Microsoft going to make a profit in the cloud? The cloud is about the centralization and automatic configuration of vast amounts of computing resources. It will allow smaller companies to turn over their infrastructure management to cloud hosting companies.
When they were self-hosting, those smaller companies were often paying licensing fees to Microsoft because of some perceived cost benefit such as support or simplicity of administration. However, when shopping for cloud services, they don't need to worry about such details, and so they can focus much more on cost. A Windows based cloud hosting company would need thousands of licenses from Microsoft, and so they could save millions by using free software instead. These savings would lead to a huge price difference.
Microsoft could always offer special savings on bulk licenses, but they are going to have to offer major price drops. The centralization of hosting will give them far fewer direct customers. Where is the great amount of money to be made in this?
Their only hope is to offer things that can't be found in free software, or to reduce administrative costs enough to offset the cost of licenses. It will be a difficult challenge.
AT&T used to have an enormous R&D program. It invented transistors, UNIX, C, information theory, ... And they even won a couple of Nobel prizes. IBM wasn't AT&T, but they still made enormous contributions like RISC and relational databases. Micro$oft has done nothing.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
cloud computing is a very bad idea. The very same things that Ballmer spoke of as being exciting and profitable are the same ones that terrify me for lots of reasons. I'm not paranoid about privacy (that's gone) but it will get worse, and the possibilities for monopolization, piracy, and loss of data integrity increase exponentially. As a small business, it makes no sense for me to embrace the risk, and as a dinosaur in the digital world, I naturally balk at centralization disguised as convenience.
Microsoft gave $9 Billion to its R&D department?
Geez; how'd Steve Jobs convince them to donate that much?
You've looked at clouds from both sides now,
From up and down, and still somehow,
Nine billion dollars, I recall
You really don't know clouds, at all.
Just because you sold your soul to the devil that needn't make you a teetotaler. --The Devil and Daniel Webster
At a previous employer, I was asked by management to estimate how much time I spend doing "research", left undefined. The explanation - it's for tax purposes, and we can get a credit for research.
I'm not going to say I read the relevant laws to find the definition, but I did follow company policy and made a best guess based on what I thought should reasonably qualify under a sane tax system. So although I didn't claim anything that a normal person would call foul, I'm sure there were some hours that wouldn't qualify.
Hours were turned into dollars, and the results collected and turned in as "research and development" spending for tax purposes. We met both the letter and spirit of the law, as much as was possible. But we were not a product company, nor a major innovator in our market(s). We did lots of research with very little to show for it. The intended purpose of the law of course would be to encourage invention if not innovation, and have a more efficient and/or productive economy, resulting in snowballing gains as different sectors picked up on advances in other areas. Makes sense.
I'm sure someone else will point out how many cool things MS research announces then fails to turn into a marketable product, so I won't go into that. I'm also sure that Microsoft's obligations to its shareholders have continually been ignored as dividend payouts have been begrudgingly given, on the odd chances they are given at all. While sitting on piles of cash. As a shareholder, i'd like to see MS Research almost entirely dismantled, dividends you can count on, and for fuck's sake replace the entire marketing silo with a small panel of the following makeup who will say which products get to market and how:
A graphic designer
A soccer/hockey/whatever mom or dad
Someone employed in middle management of a non-technology company
One person of any type who has never seen an episode of survivor or american idol
One person who knows the words to every Lady GaGa song (artist to be updated by annual shareholder vote)
One person who belongs to every social network known to man and has no concept of privacy (must have an entry on http://failbooking.com/)
Bill Gates
A rat terrier (for product testing), alternatively a young japanese man will substitute as needed
A 14 year old girl (preferably familiar with glitter and whose favorite color is pink, replaced annually for obvious reasons)
A business analyst with a marketing related education, who counts as 1/2 vote
There's your entire marketing department, and they will make better decisions and cost less money. You can probably pay them in MacBooks, Comp tickets, maid service, fairy dust and unicorn shit, rainbowed versions of normal objects like neon beer signs and the like, permanent Bing #1 results for keyword 'smush', certificates for a discount on the next purchase of a Windows(tm) product, used panties, arcade crane game baubles, and insurance benefits with an occasional kick to the balls, respectively.