Microsoft dives into cloud as resellers ask: 'What's in it for me?'

“We're rebooting, re-pivoting, re-transitioning the whole company around betting big on cloud services,” said Microsoft CFO Kevin Turner at the company’s 2010 Worldwide Partner Conference earlier this year. Turner was talking about hosted services – based mainly on Exchange and SharePoint – along with the Azure application and …

[jake]

And again, Microsoft shifts drection ...

... thus forcing all & sundry to spend countless dollars/hours retraining their staff on supposed "mainstream, commodity" software. For the umpteenth time.

During the meanwhile, some of us are still perfectly comfy with the way that the 35-ish year old UNIX[tm]/BSD interface works ... All mod cons, but still the same basic out-of-the-box functionality when you want it. There is a reason Apple's OSX has a BSD based userland ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"re-transitioning"?

That's not even a thing.

[Doug Glass]

Uh huh

Kind of like "irregardless", which the spell checker here says is spelled correctly. That's interesting since the prefix "ir" means "not" and "regardless" means "without regards". So "irregardless" therefore means "not with no regards" or "with regards". Typical for a website that specializes in newspeak and loves breaking the rules of normal language. But then, bloggers seem to do that a lot. Funny, "bloggers" is tagged as being a misspelled word. I love you guys .... low hanging fruit and all that..

[TaabuTheCat]

He's dreaming...

"We’re seeing an upside as customers see the price and say right, now I’ve got some budget for training..."

Uh, yeah, right - maybe in the first year when the budget is still intact.

The whole point of a customer moving to the cloud is to save money, not pretend they just found money to spend somewhere else on IT. It's the rare organization that reallocates savings year after year to something actually useful. Usually it just heads straight to the paychecks of the guys on top, and I doubt this time it's going to be any different.

Let's see how this partner is doing in three years.

[Doug Glass]

Paycheck to Paycheck

And you think that's not common? It's the way of the corporate world; has been for decades. And at your home, have any of your favored humans ever looked forward to payday? You bet they have because you run your household, in many ways, just like a corporation does without even knowing it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Roadmap?

Kin? The Office XML standards shambles? Retraining "opportunities" like "the ribbon"? Visual FoxPro? WinPad? Windows Help? Backword compatibility for WordBasic? The DR-DOS mess? .....and on and on and on......

The question to ask is this: "How long will the current roadmap be followed before we get a new, improved - and different - roadmap?"

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Big piece of acronym

Isn't 'BPOS' sometimes used for the phrase "Big Piece Of Sh..."?

[Doug Glass]

Never Happen

Re: “We're rebooting, re-pivoting, re-transitioning the whole company around betting big on cloud services,”

No corporation does this unless they're already in a death spiral and they feel they have no other options. Say what you want, MSFT is huge and has very deep pockets. And basement dwellers notwithstanding, their financial model has been, and continues to be, very successful by all measure that matter. Yes they need to make change, that's a necessary evolutionary process. But this will never happen as stated. Watch and see what they buy and what parts of the company they sell off or spin off ... if any. Those actions will tell you their true direction.

And remember, the wheels of Microsoft grind very finely, but they grind very slowly.

[ben_myers]

Really! What's in it for me, Microsoft?

As a reseller to small and medium business, I am already getting screwed by Microsoft on Office pricing, because my clients can buy at retail for pennies more than I pay at wholesale. This has given me motivation to push Open Office except when 1000% compatibility with Microsoft products is needed. So now Microsoft sticks all this on the cloud, meaning clients will need smaller hard drives and lower cost systems to use the cloud-based Office. Let's hope that the cloud has 99.999% availability and tight-as-can-be security, else people will become disenchanted. And, of course, the availability of the Microsoft cloud depends on local internet service providers and all those hidden providers of internet plumbing.

Microsoft has never offered any serious discounts and financial incentives to SMB resellers, instead charging for certifications. And they get beta testers to work on their products at below sweatshop wages, i.e. for free. So I guess this is no different.

Well, it will be interesting to watch... Ben

[Yordan Georgiev]

Yordan Stanchev

Several weeks ago during TechEd's Europe in Berlin the opening session ended with the words.

"We here in Microsoft are humbled to work with you our partners and customers towards a new better , cloud based future " ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bahhhh Humbug

"In the cloud"? "Cloud computing"..........

PRIVACY - not one of Microsoft's big point's with them or all the hackers and thieves.

SECURITY - not one of Microsoft's big point's with them or all the hackers and thieves.

RELIABILITY - etc...

CUSTOMER SERVICE - etc.

Blah blah blah blah........

And when the internet connection goes......

"Pfffffft!" - Along with it goes all your imaginary software, work and integrated online experiences.