Microsoft's New Mixology: Cloud and Desktop Must Be Balanced
As the Google Apps threat grows, Microsoft Business division president Stephen Elop says his message to customers is clear: You need a mix of on-premise and Web apps. But aren't some customers looking to the cloud to get away from Microsoft?
CIO —
As companies of all sizes consider what portion of their IT infrastructure and business applications to move to the cloud, Microsoft has one word of advice: Balance.
In an interview this week, Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's Business Division, which produces the Office software, stressed that companies will find the most success by accessing data through Web browsers and mobile devices when appropriate, in balance with desktop applications on a PC.
"The best experience will be the combination of the PC, phone and the browser. That's essentially the focus of what we're doing," Elop said in a phone interview with CIO.com. "What we are not saying is, hey, everything is going to go up into a browser and that's the way people are going to get everything done. We disagree with that."
Hence the Microsoft-coined term "software plus services," a slight rephrasing of the software as a service (SaaS) model, where companies such as Google, Amazon and Salesforce.com host software applications on their own Web servers and provide them to customers as a service on demand.
Google Apps Showdown Heats Up
Microsoft Office has long been the king of business productivity applications and e-mail. Roughly 80 percent of businesses that run production tools use Office, according to data from research firm Forrester. But Google's Web-based Google Apps software, which includes Gmail, looms as a threat to the Office empire as businesses recognize the cost reductions and convenience of accessing productivity apps and an e-mail system in the cloud.
Not surprisingly, Microsoft's Elop downplays the Google Apps threat to Office, saying that "the high bar for Microsoft is not to surpass the capabilities of some browser-based, simplistic piece of technology for word processing. Our challenge is to make sure that we continue to innovate beyond what we've already delivered with our products."
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Ironically, that Office innovation comes in the form of Office Web Apps, the very thing that Google already does. Elop sees the upcoming Office Web Apps — out now in technical preview and releasing in tandem with Office 2010 early next year — as a complement to the Office Desktop suite, but says that Office Web Apps can compete directly with Google Apps on their own.
