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;
I’m sat on this plane to a guy using an iPod. Is he connecting to iTunes to
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 GearsIt’s taking the best of services and combining with the best of local
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.
That’s it in a nutshell. Software plus Services
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.
Which is all well and good... except that everyone out there with a SaaS
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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