Microsoft Spends $9 Billion On Research, Focuses On Cloud 133
superapecommando writes to share that Microsoft appears to be going all-out on research in the coming year, with a great focus on the cloud. They're supposedly planning to spend $9.5 billion in R&D; that's $3 billion more than the next-closest tech company. "'Especially in light of the tough difficult macroeconomic times that we're coming out of, we chose to really lean in and double down on our innovation,' [Microsoft COO Kevin] Turner said. Turner contended that Microsoft has more cloud services than any other company, ranging from its consumer email service to hosted enterprise products such as its Dynamics CRM (customer relationship management) system to its Azure cloud operating system. 'We're going to change and reinvent our company around leading in the cloud.'"
It's _research and development_, not just research (Score:5, Informative)
Research costs Microsoft about $700M a year, probably less now after the recent belt tightening and layoffs.
R&D means everything that's involved in creating products, including developers, testers, program management, management, non-sales executive pay, etc, etc., and yes, research as well.
Azure looks interesting... But... (Score:5, Informative)
First off, there are no computing containers. What I mean by that is you can only run applications on Azure, not whole operating systems. This does have some efficiency gains (in that you don't have an added OS layer in the middle, but it VASTLY increases the tie-in to the system, and prevents you from doing simple things like adding a server template to turn on if your site gets a lot of load.
Second, It requires applications to be custom written for the environment. You can't trivially port a ready-made application from a single server to Azure... While this is good on the efficiency side, it's not good for the weekend warrior or small businesses who want to remain portable and flexible...
Third, it's only on their cloud. You have to trust MS's infrastructure. And you need to trust MS with YOUR data... It's not like amazon's offerings where clones have popped up that are compatible (so you could recreate your own cloud if you wanted to, or use a competitors)... So that locks you in to their system. My guess, is that most sizable companies won't like this at all...
I'm not saying people won't use it. I'm not saying people won't like it. What I am saying is that it is not playing in the same field as the other "Cloud" computing platforms. IF MS opens up Azure (at least in a binary form) where you can install it on your own infrastructure, then it may have a shot. If they allow guest operating systems, then it may have a shot. But without both, I think there's just too much tie-in to be comfortable (and base your business around)...
Disclaimer: This is based on a presentation which I attended by the lead engineer for Azure back in December of 08. Things may have changed since then, but I haven't kept up with it specifically...
Re:Watch This (Score:4, Informative)
Did you actually read the comments?
"Let's Open-Source the cloud (Score:2, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward writes: on Wednesday March 03, @08:50PM (#31349408)
Then we can run our own cloud and connect to it from wherever we want. There's a snowball's chance in hell I'm going to run my desktop on hardware that is out of my control, but for local applications, that might be interesting."
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"Cost prohibitive? (Score:3, Insightful)
by bsDaemon (87307) writes: on Wednesday March 03, @09:00PM (#31349544)
EC2 charges based on CPU time and bandwidth usage, so this sounds like it'd end up eating up a monthly fee of ~$netbook per month. Why would anybody want to spend their money on this?"
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"i never saw the point of cloud desktops (Score:3, Interesting)
by alen (225700) writes: on Wednesday March 03, @09:55PM (#31350268)
hardware is dirt cheap and getting cheaper. you can buy a powerful server for cheap as well. but after you buy the Citrix or whatever licenses, a few more servers for redundancy, a ton of storage at enterprise prices, the enterprise hardware support, increase network bandwidth etc the savings vanish and it's cheaper to just buy regular desktop machines.
same thing with EC2. by the time you put in the network hardware and new circuits and pay Amazon for 24x7 instances it's cheaper to just buy desktops. i'm typing this on a 5 year old HP that runs windows 7 just fine.
i bet all this cloud nonsense is enterprise hardware companies trying to push higher margin products and no real trend that anyone is doing. the numbers just don't work out"
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No? Check.
Just felt like bitching? Check.
Re:Lead or Follow? (Score:4, Informative)
If you're less than 50 users, google apps for your domain is free.
$50/user is for the google apps 'premier edition', which includes 25gb of storage, tech support, 10 year archive, 99.9% sla and other stuff like that.
Re:In other words... (Score:3, Informative)
At this point it looks like they're in a race with Google. Google is trying to add functionality to bring Docs on par with Office. Microsoft is trying to get Office online before Google replicates enough of the functionality to destroy Microsoft's licensing stream.
Wrong. Microsoft isn't just in a race against Google. It's in a race against pretty much everyone.
Take for instance its SQL Server, one of its traditional cash cows. Several years ago, my company was paying Microsoft $11,000 for a license of SQL Server 2000 (Standard Edition). A couple years later, we were paying a very small fraction of that cost for the SQL Server 2005 (Workgroup edition) without any noticeable loss of prior functionality (and no significant loss of the very nice tools/wizards that came with it).
At the time, it was competing against mySql, and other open source alternatives such as PostgreSQL, SQLite, etc. Now it's still competing against those open source alternatives, but it's probably starting to lose marketshare to the Cloud alternatives as well. Now like you've pretty much implied already, it's probably not losing much yet to the Cloud services from Google (or to Google's BigTable or to Google's Spreadsheets for instance), but once again, it isn't just competing against Google (it's still competing against everyone: the open source community, open source vendors, various cloud providers, and anyone who has a service that may not be a direct competitor to Microsoft, but that could still tangentially nibble away at and encroach more on the territories of Microsoft's biggest cash cows.
So in that sense, it's not looking too good for Microsoft's future right now, and it's not even clear if Microsoft's new strategy will help that much either. By going for the cloud, Microsoft may continue to undercut in price its very own products (not just its rivals), so it may be able to conserve some of its marketshare, but at a much more rapid and significant loss financially.