Microsoft won't dominate the cloud…but

Rob Preston, VP and Editor in Chief of InformationWeek offers an interesting assessment of Microsoft’s cloud capability and closes by saying

Microsoft won't dominate the cloud -- no company will ... it's just too big a place -- but it will be the preeminent, most profitable player there in no time.

Bold words. Rob took time to go to Redmond and see if the claims of Microsoft being “all in” were true and he seems to have left being convinced. As regular readers will know, I’ve been working on this cloud gig for over 2 years and back in 2007 Steve Ballmer said this of “cloud” at our Financial Analyst Meeting

Now, when I talk about it I talk about it quite broadly. I'm not talking just about consumer stuff, or just about advertising. I'm literally I literally believe that every piece of software, the basic core value, and the way software gets created will change over the next three, five, ten years. So every piece of software will have a client component, a server component, and service component from the cloud, that all gets managed and orchestrated out of that cloud infrastructure.

I thought that was a pretty bold statement back then – that everything we do would have a cloud component – yet we now have a version of Exchange, SharePoint, SQL, Windows Server, CRM, Office and more in the cloud. I’m genuinely impressed by the execution, in particular with Azure and with hundreds of thousands of server in our datacenters already delivering cloud services to customers like Coca Cola, Domino’s, Aviva, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Royal Mail and many more. The cloud Microsoft isn’t coming. It’s here.

Thanks Rob for looking a little deeper and shining a light on this.