By 'eck...
...that's a lot of licenses.
Customers want them. Microsoft is delivering them. And partners should sell and support them. That would be the online versions of Microsoft's existing applications - according to Microsoft. Microsoft's business applications chief Stephen Elop on Monday told Microsoft's overwhelmingly desktop-and-server-oriented partner army …
Having seen BPOS, I'm not sure there will be much for partners to do apart from selling the solution at the beginning. once the solution is in the customer is set for life and there doesn't need to be more selling so partners will need to move on to other things. The way MS are going we won't need consultants and won't have products to sell. The sad truth is we may all finally get around to learning Linux properly ready for when customers realise they prefer their data local and in house.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but it's not looking like we'll need to do much consultancy in MSWeb 3.0 land!
Anon? well Bill might spank me. Paris? well, I said spank...spAnk with an A...perverts.
Sharepoint is the biggest pile of over-engineered horseshit ever to plop its fetid ordure from the collective anus of the so-called developers in Microsoft's Business Application Division (it's not called BAD for nothing, clearly). In the name of anyone who has ever had to deploy or manage Sharepoint, I would like to go back in time and find the sibling parents of the microcephalic imbecile who devised the architecture and reduce them to their component atoms with the power of PURE ANTIMATTER. A curse on them and all their inbred offspring unto the millionth generation. For that matter, may anyone who has ever developed, promoted, sold, marketed, or advocated Sharepoint be consumed alive by a mixture of one part fire ants, one part gasoline, one part rock salt, and nine parts Richard Stallman. Fuck all of you and your twisted, hideous technological abortion with a barbed-wire dildo.
1: Saying 9/10 customers want this is not the same as saying 9/10 customers want this as their sole and exclusive way of delivering these applications.
2: I think there's probably a typo in the articel - not even MS has 100,000 million licences installed unless they have an intergalactic business we don't know about.
3: It seems to me that the achilles heel of clouds apps is ironically displayed by the "WPC WiFi network overload" issue referred to in the article - and if more & more people are using the web to do what was the local app domain, the problem may well be exacerbated.
4: I like the _idea_ of cloud computing but the practicalities need work. All those issues (where's my data, how secure/private is it, who owns it, what's my comeback if the service is down, what happens to my service and my data if the provider folds, how do I deliver service to users if there's a network outage, how do I integrate with legacy apps in a timely and performant manner etc) need to be sorted before I'd be comfortable recommending a cloud approach for my organisation.
However, I'm looking forward to seeing what MS has in the pipeline on this front, it could be interesting.
Just what I want! The same flaky shite that I have to use at work, but on the web ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H in the cloud. And to make it even better, to trust Mickey$shaft to store all my data and to keep it safe and secure!
You know the scary thing? Lots of idiots will be dumb enough to do it.
I like the idea of SharePoint. I like the decentralisation of control away from corporate communications departments.
As a developer I like being able to develop just a web part, pop it on the server and then let the users deploy it where they like; I like not having to create a Windows application, package it and then deploy it via Citrix. I don't like developing web parts when the inconsistencies in .net and Visual Studio make me feel dim.
I like the Business Data Catalog(ue) for simplicity of data deployment. I hate the Business Data Catalog(ue) for its fragility and its ability to make me feel stupid and tearful. I hate the lack of usable documentation (no, funnily enough I don't want to make data in the Adventure Works database available to all our thousands of users) and the lack of useful error reporting.
As for resellers being left out, I think that many companies would prefer their data to live on servers they control rather than in the Cloud. This would give the resellers an ongoing income stream maintaining the hosting. As always, resellers will find something to sell, even if that's only a feeling of control.
We have lots of spreadsheets doing all sorts of things I'd rather they didn't (yes, we have an end user computing program but users will be users). At the moment, if we want to upgrade our version of office, we have to undertake a MASSIVE testing program (after we've got people to confess to the existence of these spreadsheets) to make sure things still work in the same way with the new version of Excel.
We've been testing Office 2007 SP3 for a while now and plenty of the more complex (read: VBA) stuff is not even backwards compatible with Office 2007 SP2.
If we were to switch to MS Office Web Applications and MS upgraded the apps (presumably on their servers) I'm assuming a proportion of our spreadsheets and VBA code could stop working over night. It's not like it's being pushed out and we can put it on hold. It's a web address.
Obviously, I have NO intention of doing this. Just a theoretical thing.