Steve Clayton from Microsoft is a great guy with
one of the blogs I
religiously follow (and I follow a lot of RSS feeds). I actually quite
like his somewhat defensive stance – it must be hard working for a company that,
from appearances, is reviled by all the cool kids in town, and to be at the
receiving end of all those "I'm a Mac" ads must get a little tiresome. He's not
blindly pro Microsoft – and can admit when MS competitors have good products
offerings.
He does however have to toe the party line, hell hath no fury like Steve
Ballmer spurned, and I'm sure even Ray Ozzie has a
bite and a bark. Sometimes this party line just get's a little too much.
Steve posted the other day about Software+Services, Microsoft's play on SaaS saying
that;
It’s taking the best of services and combining with the best of local That’s it in a nutshell. Software plus Services
stream his music direct to his device? No, he has no connectivity hence has
downloaded it from that services (or ripped from CD) so he can use it “offline”.
When he lands and connects back up to iTunes it’ll help him store his play data
out on the Internet or connect and get some new music. That is Software plus
Services in action. So is Salesforce.com
Offline Edition and Google Gears
software to deliver the experience the user wants – the power of choice. At some
point in the future we may consume all of our software across the Internet but
I’m willing to bet against it – there is much to be gained from using the best
of both worlds. Services than run in the “cloud” of the Internet and software
than runs locally on a phone, games box, PC, Mac, iPod, television or all manner
of other devices.
is a Microsoft term that explains an industry trend and whilst I don’t expect
others, not least our competitors, to use that term they’re doing Software plus
Services. The reach of Internet services combined with the power of local
software. It’s as simple as that.
product that has offline functionality – be they Google, Salesforce, Zoho or whomever calls their product
SaaS. Pretty much everyone agrees that offline access will be a vital part of
all SaaS apps going forwards. Even Steve in his own post admits that what
Microsoft offers (in terms of the offline functionality) is much the same as
what everyone else does. Which is kind of interesting when seen in light of an
older post of his where he put a great emphasis on differentiating
S+S from SaaS.
But everyone else calls it SaaS Steve – sure S+S is a Microsoft term but is
there any need for yet another term? – why oh why does Microsoft insist on
creating a worldwide industry standard followed by one industry player – it
doesn't do MS any good, it confuses the marketplace and it's just argumentative.
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The problem with folks from Microsoft is that they are so obsessed with pushing their desktop version of software no matter what, they are overlooking the foundation. Using online apps with a browser is also software + service because browser is the local software that is residing in the user’s computer. They overlook this basic fact and talk as if theirs is the only thing that offers the real offline experience and everything else is just not a working solution. With their bloated software, people just don’t like it any more. Now they have the real choice unlike anytime in the past. Their obsession with their platform and their business model stops them from seeing the reality and this attitude will ultimately lead to their irrelevance.
And how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? What a useless debate to have. What MS is doing is part of something called marketing, Ben. Get onto something useful.
@Jim – ouch
Marketing is fine but their “marketing” involves befuddling the market place and significantly damages (or has the ability to) the other vendors out there.
As such I believe the discussion is useful – if for no other reason than to create a foil to the MS line
But your central theme is what they call it. And I don’t think they’re befuddling the market. Everyone who’s interested (and outside of the technophiles, that’s not many)understands what they are doing – and see it as evil or not depending on their prejudices. Personally I think they simply are treading a careful course to maintain existing revenue streams while evolving their business model in an environment where the future is not certain, despite what some techies might think. You’d do the same if you were running MS.