Office 365 Growth Opportunity 'a Lot Bigger Than Anything We've Achieved', Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says (cnbc.com)

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Monday suggested that Microsoft could grow more from its Office 365 line of cloud productivity apps than anything in the company's 43-year history. From a report: With business editions of Office 365, Microsoft faces competition from Google, as well as younger players like Box and Dropbox, in the race to get companies collaborating in apps running on remote cloud servers. "The growth opportunity for what is Office 365 is a lot bigger than anything we've achieved, even with our high penetration in the client-server world," Nadella said at the Morgan Stanley Technology Media and Telecom conference in San Francisco. When companies transition from Microsoft's traditional licensing business to cloud-based subscriptions, it's "not a one-for-one move," Nadella told Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss at the event. Microsoft recently introduced the Microsoft 365 bundle, which includes Office as well as Windows, along with enterprise security and mobility services. Nadella also talked up the company's potential in the Azure public cloud infrastructure business, where it competes with Google as well as Amazon Web Services. "We had a good business in our server business, but this business is orders of magnitude bigger than what used to be a successful server business," he said.

Comments

Yeah no shit.

[o_ferguson]

Subscription model is user abuse. Well done.

Re:Yeah no shit.

[wardrich86]

cloud service benefits

I'm still trying to figure out the benefits of storing your data on multiple servers that you have no control over, and no idea where exactly they are. When you delete a file from the cloud, is it actually properly deleted? If the cloud is attacked, how long will it take for the parent company to admit they were hacked? I like the concept of cloud storage, but I have 0 trust or faith in that system at all.

Re:Yeah no shit.

[subanark]

Let's see here.

Benefits: Your data is managed by experts whose main focus is keeping everyone's data secure, available and reliable. Multiple servers ensure redundancy and if needed globally available to allow for minimal latency.

"you have no control over", "is [a file] actually properly deleted"
Is this any different than trusting your local IT professional? What would be the fallout it if your AWS, Azure, Google, ect... was found to not treat a customers data in a secure and private way (please don't use a counter example from a middle tier service like iCloud, one drive, or google drive)?

"If the cloud is attacked, how long will it take for the parent company to admit they were hacked?"
A lot sooner, now that the EU is putting GDPR into place.

-- A personal opinion from your friendly Azure engineer

Re:Yeah no shit.

[dave562]

We are starting to use Azure. We have an E5 license for ~5000 seats of Office 365, including OneDrive and Skype for Business. Given all of that, I am a bit biased. Also for full disclosure, we are building out a hybrid cloud with Azure to augment our four data centers (2 in the US, 1 in the UK, 1 in Dubai). I have also been doing IT for 20 years, so I have seen some trends come and go.

This whole FUD about "don't trust the cloud with your data" is getting REALLY old. Microsoft (and AWS) have more redundancy and security built into their infrastructure that you could ever hope to build into a private setup. I say this as someone who is managing close to 4 PB of data being remote replicated via SRDF (for our EMC gear) and array based replication (for the Pure stuff).

By the end of next year, we will have moved the majority of our remote office file server data into OneDrive and MS Teams. We are going to be able to save huge amounts of money by not having to buy Data Domain hardware to replicate back to our core data centers, and we are going to get better reliability, versioning and recovery options.

I trust Microsoft's security team of hundreds of engineers, analysts and support staff more than I trust the half dozen guys in house. And I say this as someone who has been interested in, and responsible for computer security since the mid-90s. There is no way that a small SOC at a mid-sized corporation can hold a candle to a 24x7 global operation like Microsoft (or Amazon). It just is not going to happen.

While we still run a lot of our applications in house, we are using Azure for development and proof of concept work. When you look at the costs of enterprise class storage with all of the compliance boxes checked (at rest encryption, remote replication, etc.) there is no way that we can provide storage in a cost competitive way to the business.

Our clients are slowly coming around to trusting the cloud as well. We work with heavy regulated industries including financial services and healthcare. We have a lot of sensitive data on our networks. But as our clients shift their own workloads to the cloud (I hate that term), they are becoming more permissive of allowing us to move the data that we host for them there as well.

I think that in 10 years from now, the only companies that are going to still be hosting their own infrastructure are going to be big banks, tech and manufacturing firms that are still building things and need strict controls over their IP. Other than that, the costs of paying other people to run infrastructure for you are just too compelling. There is no way to stay competitive with that.

Re:Yeah no shit.

[tzanger]

Cable only makes sense for people who have kids.

Nonsense. Cable is the worst thing for kids. A constant stream of commercials demanding their attention, a thousand channels of shit. My three (14, 9, 5) only ever see commercials when they're at a friend's house and the interruption drives them nuts. Netflix has a good selection of kid's content and between plex and what we rent from appletv... the rest is covered.

Cable TV is an abomination and needs to die.

We will rake you over hotter coals than ever b4!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is truly an excellent opportunity to make money off of charging people a monthly fee for what used to be a fairly affordable one-time purchase. Sad that the big thing Microsoft is pumped about is a stale word processor and spreadsheet package. Satya's idea of innovation is a payment plan almost nobody actually likes.

Insert MICROS~1 advert on the Microsoft slashdot

[najajomo]

'When companies transition from Microsoft's traditional licensing business to cloud-based subscriptions, it's "not a one-for-one move"'

Instead of paying the once for the software, you'll be paying a yearly rent into perpetuity. Does anyone here remember when this was a technology forum?

Translation to plain english:

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

What he said:

When companies transition from Microsoft's traditional licensing business to cloud-based subscriptions, it's "not a one-for-one move," Nadella told Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss

What is means: We were foolish to have sold perpetual licenses for just a one time hit. People who can move out have already moved out of MsOffice. Those who have not moved out, could not so. So we have them by their balls. We are going to make them all pay month after month to get access to their own data. Dont worry about users holding on to their old licenses. We make life hell for them, and they will eventually succumb and move to cloud and pay us our due share, our daily bread. It might be their data, but they stored it in our formats. Now they are our prisoners, we will never release them, but continue to bleed them dry.

Re: Translation to plain english:

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Open? You mean the OOXML abomination? With binary blobs that can not be parsed by anything other than the old MS office functions? MsOffice has an emulator in which old code is executed to parse these blobs. They have still not provided a reference implementation of their own standard. And their own standard is, "feed this to the old ms office binary, what ever it spits out is the standard behavior"

We've had nothing but problems with o365 migration

[MindPrison]

...at one of the biggest companies in the world.

I'm an IT supporter there, and we're currently drowning in migration issues from the old system to o365. Profiles messing up, shared mails not working properly, license issues prohibiting our users from reading the mails and thus working. Literally thousands of calls, hundreds just at my department every day about Outlook o365 migration issues.

Get it working before you brag!