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Feet in the Clouds
The focus of PDC 2008 has been to get developers excited about "cloud-computing" as much as the new Windows 7.
This year's Professional Developers Conference (PDC 2008) has been as much about getting developers excited about Microsoft's "cloud-computing" strategy as it's been about Windows 7, Windows Vista's successor. At Microsoft's yearly Financial Analyst Meeting this summer, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie set the stage for the announcements at PDC, introducing a new set of phrases naming major aspects of Redmond's latest cloud initiative.
New Names, New Faces
Led by Corporate Vice President Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft Global Foundation services is responsible for building out and running the worldwide infrastructure for the company's cloud-services portfolio. Developing the software platform is the responsibility of Amitabh Srivastava, corporate VP of Cloud Infrastructure Services. David Treadwell, corporate vice president of Live Platform Services, is responsible for the "unified identity and directory, data synchronization, transport and presence" and other services that provide the developer interfaces to Microsoft's cloud-computing platforms.
Princeton graduate, veteran of the early days of Windows NT development and prior head of the .NET Developer Platform team, Treadwell has not been a conspicuous presence before developers since his PDC 2005 keynote with Eric Rudder three years ago. We're likely to be seeing a lot more if him again, though, now that Microsoft is getting specific about its cloud-computing plans.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer primed the pump in the lead-up to PDC on Oct. 1, 2008, at Microsoft's "Technologies to Change Your Business: How Customers Are Implementing Tomorrow's Strategies Today" conference in London, touting Windows Cloud as "a new operating system." Said Ballmer: "We need a new operating system designed for the cloud and we'll introduce one in about four weeks. We'll even have a name to give you by then. But let's just call it, for the purposes of today, 'Windows Cloud.'"
Windows Cloud would, Ballmer said, "Create seamless experiences that combine the magic of software with the power of the Internet across a world of devices." Ballmer then went on to boast that there would be "nobody out there with as wide a range of cloud-computing services as Microsoft -- including, dare I say it, Google."
Gauging Google
Google, of course, has emerged as the greatest potential threat to Microsoft dominance since Netscape and the "browser wars" of the mid- to late-1990s. Still, Ballmer downplayed the threat.
"[Google] in fact has a great search product, but at the end of the day, doesn't really have much for enterprise e-mail, productivity, collaboration. They're trying; they're coming to the game; but are not really there yet," Ballmer said, before continuing on about competition from Google Apps. "Well, those are not very popular products!"
Ballmer's remarks notwithstanding, Redmond views Google as a very serious competitor, and its cloud-computing initiative is designed to meet the challenge posed by Google. Microsoft's attempted acquisition of Yahoo! was motivated largely by concern that Google is well ahead of Microsoft, not only in search but in obtaining advertising revenue from the Web. And while Google Apps haven't taken much market share from Microsoft Office, there's no reason to assume they can't do so in the future.
SaaS Stratagem
Beyond Google, Microsoft faces a growing challenge from software capability delivered over the Internet in a Software as a Service (SaaS) format. As it turns out, a very large proportion of that software is not being written using Microsoft tools and platforms.
That's evident with a cursory glance at one of the hottest new categories of software apps: enterprise social networking (ESN). ESN involves the application of techniques pioneered by public social-networking sites -- YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the like -- to the business enterprise.
ESN vendors that started early -- before, say, 2006 -- have enjoyed spectacular growth and dozens more have jumped in and are doing well, too. But with the sole exception of Neighborhood America, it's easier to find a rose blooming out of doors in Antarctica than to find an ESN vendor using Microsoft tools and platforms. A handful use Java, but most rely on some version of the LAMP stack, which consists of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python or Ruby.
So while it's important for Microsoft to respond to Google as a threat, it's even more vital to persuade developers of Internet and intranet SaaS apps that Microsoft's tools and platforms are a better option than LAMP. Otherwise, as more enterprise software moves toward SaaS architectures, LAMP could prove an even deeper and more serious threat to Microsoft than Google.
A lot is at stake as Microsoft kicks off a new round of cloud-computing platform initiatives. And the cloud-computing announcements coming out of PDC 2008 are only the first salvo in this effort.
About the Author
William F. Zachmann, born before the modern digital computer was invented, has lived with them (and made his living off of them) all his life. He was director of research for The Forum Corp. in the mid-'70s and senior vice president of corporate research at International Data Corp. (IDC) in the '80s. He has a copy of Windows 1.0 that Bill Gates signed for him the night it was rolled out at Comdex Fall '85. Zachmann is now director of Canopus Research Inc. He programs in C# using Visual Studio 2005 with a focus on ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005.