Enterprise Software: Beyond Microsoft Vista
But while Microsoft’s executives are preaching the gospel, their language sometimes betrays the company’s famously closed culture. Lees, for example, introduced the concept of supporting applications built on non-Microsoft platforms by saying that’s "what’s called interoperable," as if no one in the room had ever heard the term before. Slips like this demonstrate just how large a change Microsoft is trying to make.
Ozzie, the man replacing Gates as the chief visionary, says supporting a Web services environment is just a logical extension of the expertise Microsoft developed in the client/server era. And at the end of the day, Ozzie says, the same skill set that made Microsoft the most important vendor then—an understanding of business issues like security, manageability and compliance, as well as its experience with development tools like .Net—will prove to be the most important factors in the software-as-a-service world.
Microsoft has the experience to build the tools that will make the services era manageable, he says. "It’s unsexy," Ozzie says, "but it’s what’s going to make [hosted] services as important as technologies inside the data center are today."
Senior Writer Ben Worthen can be reached at bworthen@cio.com.
