Microsoft's Head In The Cloud?

Following up on my article about SaaS and Cloud Computing yesterday, it is worth knowing what Microsoft are up to.

A senior source at Microsoft told me last year that Microsoft believe that delivering all their Office Suite of products to Small and Medium Businesses (SMEs) is a priority and could account for up to half their business in the future.

Of course, as usual with Microsoft, no one quite knows when that future is - as we have just seen on typical announcements about new product version availabilities.

Azure Tinted Glasses

Microsoft's firm strategy to tackle both Google and Amazon's significant advances on Cloud Computing Services are in the form of a new online operating system called Azure. In the race to secure this ground, Azure is seen as Microsoft's major play for the future.

But Microsoft loves mixed messages. Steve Clayton, Head of Software and Services at Microsoft International has said that on-premises products are still very much part of the future. Citing Google's much publicised recent outage, he pointed to the fact that reliability is still a key issue.

That comes as pretty laughable from a company that produces an operating system that is subject to virus, phishing and hacking every day due to its lack of security and whose products regularly crash mid session (as I type I have a frozen Internet Explorer open on my machine that has 3Gb of memory and XP). An outage at Google is massively publicised yet Vista users every day encounter annoying problems which impact productivity unnecessarily.

But that's Microsoft for you - follow Steve Ballmer's advice 'Microsoft is the answer, now tell me what was the question?'

Online Applications Soon

What Clayton did concede is that Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint will be online soon.

I am not sure about everyone else but I have found applications like OneNote and SharePoint to be very exciting and then very disappointing. SharePoint has lots of 'cool' features, particularly very good dashboard facilities but as with so many Microsoft products it solves parts of the problems and then leaves gaping holes with no attempt to plug them. Sold as an Action Tracking style system it pails into insignificance when matched with say ActionBase yet the two work well together to solve the bigger problems.

Dynamics is similar, a poor man's version of Salesforce.com it neither gives you the features you need nor the integration - Salesforce.com is way in advance. Yet all of it comes with the Microsoft tag and that has enormous clout for many Corporates as I dare say Azure will have when it finally arrives.

Until then Google and Amazon are way out in front on Cloud Computer facilities and I recommend that, if you are a small business concerned about the cost of scaling your business up and down, then Cloud Computing is well worth considering.