When "all-in" is too much

In March of this year Steve Ballmer, rather famously, promised that Microsoft is "all-in" on cloud computing and the company has been striving to demonstrate its commitment ever since. While the very nature of their "Software+Services" approach and the degree to which the company coffers continue to rely on plain old vanilla desktop software for replenishment might call the true dedication into question, the delivery of new products such as the Azure cloud platform, the Business Productivity Online Suite combination of hosted Exchange and Sharepoint, and the Office Live efforts to put Office into a genuine web-based service, have certainly made me hopeful that the company has gotten a clue and is working hard to deliver genuine cloud-based services. To the extent that they are simply reinforcing their desktop products with most of these offerings, I think that if it's not genuine, efficient SaaS that they are offering, at least it is a step toward that ideal with a healthy component of protecting existing revenue streams.

Unfortunately, while the technologies themselves have moved, at least incrementally, toward true multi-tenant online delivery, the marketing and licensing has not made any progress toward the simplified click-and-go service that consumers have become accustomed to and which enterprise IT is increasingly being asked for. Witness today's announcement of Office 365.

Office 365 isn't available yet, and won't be until next year, but that's okay, because it's not actually a new product as most of us understand the term. Instead, it's a rebranding of BPOS, Office Live Small Business, and a few other vaguely related services (why were these so fragmented in the first place?). Mary Jo Foley lists the relative non-changes here.

I'm gratified that they seem to be improving the small business offering, but confused as to why that differs so much from the enterprise offering. In the bad old days of desktop and server software, I could see the need for such distinctions. Today, when tiny one-man outfits are finding significant uses for cloud services like Amazon S3 and major businesses and government agencies are fitting themselves comfortably into the same Google Apps that you and I use, I think they're just unnecessarily complicating matters. I'm supposed to be a professional, and yet it's not obvious to me at first glance what direction to go with these new offerings for various clients. Of course, that's what they pay me to figure out; but I'm not going to take their money on this stuff. There are safer options out there that are more easily understood, and that's what I'll recommend.

That's unfortunate, because options are important, and as a major player in business software, Microsoft should be a legitimate option. Instead, they are fumbling around like a three-person startup that doesn't have any strategic focus and can barely get a product out the door, much less support and extend it. Microsoft doesn't have both feet on the ground in this game yet, and the rebranding and shuffling is a bad sign for potential customers. It was bad enough when they were able to discontinue desktop products that you came to rely on, but at least you could still run your FoxPro database as long as you wanted after they killed the product. SaaS offerings require more commitment. Until the company gets a clue and simplifies and standardizes what they are offering, I plan to steer most clients away from them.