Question...

Google Takes Another Swipe at Microsoft's Enterprise

I should add... Microsoft offers financially-backed SLAs for their Cloud email and productivity services (unlike Google).


On Jun 09 04:19 PM Question... wrote:

> I'll admit it... I love Outlook. I think this is a testament to the
> flexibility and value find in Office - Outlook in particular. I've
> been getting both my enterprise email and my consumer Hotmail in
> Outlook for quite a while, so my reaction to Gmail in Outlook is
> "what took so long?"
>
> In fact, I can ship even ship FedEx packages in Outlook. Even beyond
> email and calendar, it's a fabulous tool... it connects to SharePoint
> and is easily custumizable to include LOB data and workflows. <br/>
>
> BTW: Folks who like their Exchange email but want a low cost cloud
> version can **try it free** here: www.microsoft.com/onli...
> ... and get SharePoint collaboration, web conferencing, and enterprise-grade
> IM, as well.

Google Takes Another Swipe at Microsoft's Enterprise

I'll admit it... I love Outlook. I think this is a testament to the flexibility and value find in Office - Outlook in particular. I've been getting both my enterprise email and my consumer Hotmail in Outlook for quite a while, so my reaction to Gmail in Outlook is "what took so long?"

In fact, I can ship even ship FedEx packages in Outlook. Even beyond email and calendar, it's a fabulous tool... it connects to SharePoint and is easily custumizable to include LOB data and workflows.

BTW: Folks who like their Exchange email but want a low cost cloud version can **try it free** here: www.microsoft.com/onli... ... and get SharePoint collaboration, web conferencing, and enterprise-grade IM, as well.

Cloud Wars: Is There Room for Google and Microsoft?

The broad, extremely horizontal productivity apps like email, collaboration, web conferencing, etc. are important, but IMO they represent just the tip of the iceberg for enterprises... the bulk of technology is put to use in more specialized applications. After all, even something as perasive as general ledger is more specialized than email, and a great many apps are very specialized... these specialized apps form the ISV market, and also exist as the custom software apps that enterprises build for themselves.

This is where the cloud can really offer the biggest advantage to enterprises, and it's where it's most critical to have a strong security, inteoperability, and manageability story to complement the development story. These attributes - security, interoperability, and manageability - are critical because enterprises do not, IMO, want to create new silos in the clouds or obsolete their SOA, systems managment, and identity managment consolidation efforts of the last 7-8 years. Instead, I think most want to leverage them and see them extend to include the cloud so that they can manage their total technology portfolios more effectively (whether in the data center, on devices, in the clouds, or hybrid of all three).

I think Microsoft's heritage as a platform provider will be a real advantage here. Complementing the Microsoft Online Services you mentioned, that heritage is showing itself in emerging services like Windows Azure, and the related Azure Services Platform, as well as in continued innovation on "edge" device and server software platforms to make them more "cloud-aware".

For these reasons, I'm very optimistic about Microsoft's long term opportunities. The industry movement from siloed SaaS apps to a wholistic approach where software in the cloud, on servers, and across devices all work together well is just getting started, but I think Microsoft is carving out a leadership position that will be difficult for competitors to match.

Read more on my blog: blogs.msdn.com/johnmul...

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft but my opinions are my own.

Can Google Reach Its Pie in the Sky?

Some interesting thoughts in there.

@Dennis, my understanding of the software-plus-services term is that Microsoft is trying to emphasize the emerging industry trend toward software and SaaS solutions/environments working well together -- something that would make the cloud much more practical and useful in more cases. If they are able to deliver effectively on their own efforts to make the cloud and their large base of software (and ecosystem) play nicely, customers should get some powerful new capabilities and greater flexibility.