Microsoft moves deeper into the software services arena

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This is MSFT's ace in the hole

What people and prognosticators don't seem to understand is that Microsoft has a serious advantage over Google and the like in that they can offer a choice of on-premises, hosted or a combination. Google has one option: we'll host it for you and you'll use a dumb-client (aka Web browser) to access it. In Microsoft's case they can offer Exchange as a hosted service and the end customer can use Outlook on the client. And, they can offer SharePoint as a hosted service and the end customer can use Office as the client. Or the end customer can host Exchange themselves and purchase add-on servicers (encryption, spam filtering) as a hosted service from Microsoft and their partners. Either way the customer has more options. With Google...well, you can use either IE or Firefox to access Google's datacenter.

The web is an amazing thing. It's particularly good at providing easy access to data for users and applications. The Web is not the beset platform for end-user applications. The challenge for the likes of Microsoft and Apple is that users currently think that the hassles of installing and updating local applications isn't worth the hassle. That's a problem that they can fix. Once they do and are able to offer the proverbial best of both worlds of powerful client applications (on Macs, PC's, phones) then the neato wowie reations to AJAX-based browser apps will become...gee, that's sort of lame.

Posted by: marksashton   Posted on: 03/03/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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