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There’s a cloud in Microsoft’s blue sky thinking, and it’s coming much closer with this week’s release of the latest Windows Live services. The Windows Live suite includes the first public beta of Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger 8.5, the Windows Live Writer blogging tool, Windows Live OneCare Family Safety, and the Windows Live Toolbar, plus a new unified installer to download these applications and keep them up to date. We’ve all got used to being able to access our data and emails, and even more personal stuff, from anywhere, using any device. We’re therefore all strong candidates for software as a service, buying only what we need and for as long as we need it, instead of installing one bloated package bigger than the last on an ever-larger local drive, knowing that we’ll only ever use a fraction of the functionality. Software as a service - or as Microsoft insists on calling it, software plus service - presents the desktop giant with a couple of problems. Firstly, their business is built on “thick” clients, identifiable servers, PCs and laptops, with registered customers who either renew their licences regularly or are pursued with a persistence and ferocity combining the Spanish Inquisition with the Readers Digest direct mail operation. In Microsoft’s nightmare scenario, these users will turn to web services, renting only what they need, and not necessarily renting all or even any of it from Microsoft. Which brings us to the second problem: Microsoft is coming late into a field where Google is dominant, is trusted, and is offering reliable applications like StarOffice which are free. At least on the surface, Google also adopts an insouciant, take it or leave it attitude to its users, which couldn’t contrast more strongly with hardline Microsoft fundamentalism. There’s so far no word that Microsoft intends to make its mainstream products like Word, Excel and PowerPoint available as services, although the company has said that in the near future all its products will include an online component. We can already see the form this will take in Windows Live, which offers a limited range of functions adapted for specific circumstances, complementing rather than replacing the desktop, with some bits free, or rather, paid for by advertising. Microsoft is initially targetting leading-edge users who are happy to wrestle with beta releases. It will then move on to address consumers in general. A lot of businesses are very keen to start buying software as a service -although given the awesome complexity of current Microsoft licensing arrangements, the mind boggles at what a mixture of server-based and web service software (which is what software plus service means) would involve. Software as a service is also likely to be bad news for systems administrators, since half their jobs are likely to disappear without all those patches to apply. However, since Microsoft seems determined only to support the current version of Internet Explorer, there may be plenty of patch work to do after all. Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has been giving presentations about the “utility computing fabric upon which all of our online services run”. (Perhaps that should be “will run”) He calls it the Cloud Infrastructure Services layer. Hasn’t it occurred to anyone at Microsoft that clouds are made of vapour? Nick Langley Sep 7, 2007 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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