Balmer, left, apologises for the idiot on the right who said the Internet would never take off!
For a company that once turned up its nose at the very thought of the Internet Microsoft is doing a remarkable job of catching up on lost time. Recently I reviewed the company’s cloud based offering – Office Live – and commented on how seamlessly it merged the webside application with the desktop version. Now Steve Balmer has revealed that 70 per cent of Microsoft’s team are working on cloud based applications.
Balmer recently reaffirmed the company’s commitment to the cloud in an email to staff which read:
“Other companies have defined the cloud in a narrow, one-dimensional way,” he wrote. “Although these companies provide some interesting components, Microsoft is uniquely delivering on a wide range of cloud capabilities that bring increasingly more value to our customers.
“This view fuels our investments across the entire company, from datacenters to cloud platform technologies to cloud-based development tools and applications. Today, nearly every one of our products has, or is developing, features or services that support the cloud. As I said today, when it comes to the cloud, we are all in. We are all in across every product line we have and across every dimension of the cloud.
“Of course, there is more work to do. We have strong competitors. We need to be (and are) willing to change our business models to take advantage of the cloud. We must move at ‘cloud speed’, especially in our consumer offerings. And we need to be crystal clear about the value we provide to all our customers.
“We have an enormous opportunity in front of us. We have great products and services in the market today and a range of new ones on their way. All of our products make the cloud better, and the cloud makes our products better.”
In general terms Balmer doesn’t let a lot slip. It isn’t rocket science to understand that Microsoft has to migrate its Office software to the cloud to keep in with the game not even ahead of it. Also, Microsoft is developing its Azure platform to let third party developers ride on the back of it – that collaborative side of Microsoft hasn’t been prominent in the past but maybe the Big M is realising that the cloud is all about co-operation and collaboration and that is revolutionary.
