Microsoft sees a silver lining in the cloud

  
[credit: Sunday Times]

The Sunday Times here in the UK had a lengthy interview with Stephen Elop yesterday under the title Microsoft sees a silver lining in the cloud. It covered the impact of the cloud at Microsoft and reaffirmed that Microsoft is not “just flirting with it, they were going the whole hog”. The article talks about the momentum of our online services with customers in like Aviva and McDonald’s recently signing up. It also looks forward to the coming Office 2010 and in particular Office Web Apps which takes Office on to the web and in some cases for free.

I liked his quote on SharePoint - “When something is hot you pour fuel on it,”. The other quote I enjoyed was from Claudio Alvarez at GP Bullhound who said “We are still far from the time when everything goes in the cloud,”….“we need a lot more bandwidth for that to happen.” I had this exact discussion with an analyst this morning who was very keen on the notion that everything would be in the cloud in a few years and we’d use dumb terminals be that mobile phones or PC’s. Needless to say I totally disagreed – not because I’m brainwashed in the Microsoft approach but because I think the world will be hybrid with some of the intelligence/data on your local device and some in the cloud. I just don’t foresee a world where I push all my photos exclusively to the cloud only to have to bring them back down again when I want to view them. That’s no fun in a world of 10 megapixel photos and remember that your broadband at home is broadband downlink with a much slower uplink. Sure when we all have 100mb+ to our door (dedicated) things may change but I’ll bet the performance of local devices will have advanced faster and there will still be good reason to use your 10Ghz chip in your phone to do on device panoramic stitching of photos.

Right…off the hobby horse for a while and back to work.