The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Cloud Computing: Microsoft Plays Catch Up
Reminiscent to the browser wars of the mid-90’s when Microsoft was late to the Internet browser game but ultimately managed to best the Netscape Navigator, Microsoft has now woken up to the cloud, and has decided to focus huge amounts of money on cloud technology in an attempt to make up lost ground.
A decade ago, in 2000, Bill Gates wrote a now-famous memo to Microsoft employees outlining a shift in focus: “Today we must make a similar bet on using software to improve the way people experience the Internet—an even more important revolution than the GUI.”
In 2005, Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft and technical successor to Bill Gates, wrote about how Microsoft must change to compete in the world of the internet. “This model has the potential to fundamentally impact how we and other developers build, deliver, and monetize innovations.”
Now both Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie are gone from the role of technical lead at Microsoft. In March 2010, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that Microsoft was “all in” for work on the cloud. Ballmer later, in a letter to employees wrote that “We need to be (and are) willing to change our business models to take advantage of the cloud. We must move at cloud speed, especially in our consumer offerings.”
This year’s financials at Microsoft show that they are going to try to be serious about the cloud. Microsoft has allocated a budget of $9.6 billion on research and development over the next year, and 90 percent of that budget — $8.64 billion — is going towards cloud computing. That’s quite a sum of money. But to properly spend that much money, Microsoft needs a good plan. One question is, “who is left to lead and architect a plan”?
Derrick Harris on GigaOm commented that “What Microsoft absolutely cannot afford to do is to get Windows Azure to a place where it’s good enough — in terms of software or hardware — and then grind innovation to a slow crawl. Cloud computing is about constant innovation — take a look at AWS’s rate of feature rollouts — and it’s possible Microsoft could get complacent as its service provider partners like Dell, Fujitsu and, possibly, Rackspace start offering Windows Azure as a service and do the brunt of the work of attracting customers.”
