No matter how you look at it, Microsoft is an amazing company. Its ability to adapt in the marketplace is amazing. Over and over you see Microsoft enter a market after it has been established and then become an industry leader after the fact. In the Database space, Microsoft SQL Server is the fastest growing database today. My latest blog entry is from
Scobleizer an interesting blogger.
His latest article is on Microsoft and it’s latest announcements..
Never underestimate Microsoft’s ability to turn a corner
This
week Microsoft didn’t get much hype for its three major announcements.
Certainly it didn’t stay on top of TechMeme as long as, say, if Steve
Jobs gets a sniffle. But don’t miss what they did.
1. On day 1 of the PDC they announced Azure, which is a set of cloud
services that competes with Amazon’s S3 and Rackspace’s Mosso and will
radically change enterprises’ acceptance of cloud services for a whole
lot of reasons.
2. On day 2 of the PDC they showed off Windows 7 which is getting
high praise from my blogging friends who were lent laptops with it on
there (I didn’t get Windows 7 yet).
3. On day 3 of the PDC they showed off new Web-based versions of
Microsoft Office that were really nice. Will the new PowerPoint have
the collaborative features, of, say, SlideRocket? Will Zoho go out of
business? No, and no, but this is a significant move into the Web for a
group that’s tried to pretend that the Web didn’t matter that much.
4. They also released new Mac and Mobile versions of Mesh and
further explained how that’ll enable new kinds of Internet-connected
apps to be built.
Some really great resources on all this:
Microsoft put up videos of every session at the PDC.
Ars Technica covered it well.
Microsoft’s own Channel 9 has a ton of videos.
I have a database of all blogs and good items on FriendFeed for these searches:
So, lets talk about whether Microsoft will be successful in changing
the marketplace again. First some things you should remember:
- Microsoft has an extraordinarly strong sales force.
- Microsoft is a world-wide company with thousands of evangelists
located in almost every local market. When I attended the Converge
South conference in North Carolina, Microsoft had an evangelist there
to make sure everyone got the latest software they were pitching. Same
thing happens in Israel. In China. In Russia. In Dubai. In India. Does
Rackspace have that kind of on-the-ground sales muscle? No.
- Microsoft is one of the few companies with enough cash to ride out
the recession in good shape and keep its data centers up-to-date with
the latest machines.
- Microsoft has a huge set of developers who know Visual Studio well
and have been building apps with C# and Visual Basic for years now.
- Microsoft has sales leverage due to its other products. Here’s an
imaginary Microsoft salesperson’s pitch: “You want Exchange server?
Your company will need to buy that unless you’re a small startup and
can consider going with a new approach like Gmail. Well, how about you
get it a lot cheaper if you go with our cloud services?” Same for
Sharepoint. Or SQL Server.
Translation: It doesn’t matter that Microsoft didn’t get all that
much hype this year at the PDC or that it didn’t sell out or that other
companies like Amazon, Google, and Rackspace are ahead in the cloud
game.
You just saw Ray Ozzie turn the creaky old cruiseliner hard to port and damn, it is impressive.
What do you think? Am I right? Did the old cruiseliner just make a major corner turn? Or is this all stuff that can be ignored?
To reach the original posting....
Never underestimate Microsoft’s ability to turn a corner
Microsoft is an amazing company, that has shown time after time an abilty to turn the trip quickly. It's clear Microsoft has set its targets on cloud computing and will be a leader in that space in no time. Yes the ship is turning and I would not get in its way.
Posted by Michael Corey CEO & Founder Ntirety
www.ntirety.com