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.'"
In other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
"...We're not sure our OS and Office monopoly will last forever, so we'd really like to see if we could actually turn a profit on something else."
Re: (Score:1, Redundant)
Pretty much...
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
"...We're not sure our OS and Office monopoly will last forever, so we'd really like to see if we could actually turn a profit on something else."
If you aren't growing, you're dying. True for any business.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
True, but MBAs and the over-testosteroned in general are famous for believing their own BS.
How many legs does a dog have, if... (Score:1, Insightful)
True, but MBAs and the [microcephalics] in general are famous for believing their own BS.
Calling marketing as 'research' doesn't make it research, no matter how true believers the MBAs get.
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
That has been the case. But Google and Apple and Linux might have given MS the shock they need. Disraeli described China as "a sleeping dragon". Microsoft may not be dissimilar. They have vast financial resources, an enormous userbase. What they may be capable of if they wake up and use that could be fantastic. And I think we're now starting to see signs that they're doing so. Windows 7 is a nice jump forward. The Courier looks interesting. Bing is as good as Google (actually, the image search is a bit nic
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
:)
Re: (Score:2)
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to accompany a family member who was acting as a faculty chaperon on a business school trip to Japan to meet with various CEOs of companies there. My favorite visit, for numerous reasons, was to meet with the CEO of a 500-year-old, family-run, sake brewer. During the Q&A, the MBA students kept asking variations of the same question about how he was planning to grow the business. They'd ask about international expansion plans or marketing campaigns inside Japan and
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
People that believe that probably also believe in perpetual, unbounded growth (population, profit, etc.) within a closed system (the Earth). It is not possible.
Businesses that will succeed in the future will do so without requiring unsustainable, endless growth. I don't know how to do that, but the first guy to figure it out is going to be really, really rich.
Re: (Score:2)
Businesses that will succeed in the future will do so without requiring unsustainable, endless growth. I don't know how to do that, but the first guy to figure it out is going to be really, really rich.
I think he'll be reasonably rich.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:In other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have always said that they knew Windows and Office won't last forever. in the last 10 years they expanded into video games, business software, database servers, general IT servers for IT management, etc.The "cloud" is just a buzzword. few months ago i was reading some article about how someone was deploying servers for some internal project. and the article said they were building out a private cloud.
most of the cloud nonsense is for small businesses. i've helped a few build infrastructure and it's a waste of money buying servers, Windows Server licenses, etc. easier and cheaper to outsource it to Azure, Google or someone else.
for larger businesses hardware is so cheap that it doesn't make sense. We're about to buy a few $15,000 servers when the new Intel CPU's come out. 2 6 core CPU's, 72GB of RAM, 500GB to 1TB of hard drive space, all kinds of monitoring capability, etc for $15,000 each.
i was talking to an IT sales person the other day and he didn't even try to sell an hardware to us. he kept on pushing services. servers are a commodity made in China by little kids. just like ipods. I guess services is the next frontier to try to squeeze some profits
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm dealing with a lot of the same issues that you mentioned. Specifically the SMB market and the move toward online hosting of services. What I've been finding is that although you can realize a savings in hardware cost, you end up losing some of those savings by having to bring in faster and redundant internet feeds.
Where have you seen the dividing line materialize for the decision to keep it in house versus move it offsite?
Re: (Score:2)
i calculated the cost of a 64GB 8 core server 24x7 at EC2 and it came out to something like $6000 a year. This will run you $10,000 to $13,000 total for a HP PRoliant DL 380 G5.
it's very simple. you buy a server onsite you can use regular hard drives, etc. Amazon and the other cloud providers have to buy all kinds of expensive SAN's and redundancy. In practice they have to buy two servers to let you host your one server that you will buy normal hard drives for.
then there are upgrades. our server purchases t
Re: (Score:2)
The server hardware costs are easy enough to figure out. We're using similar boxes here (Proliant ML370s). The boxes I was looking at came out to about $8000. They were similar to yours, but had one processor instead of two and 8GB of RAM instead of 64. I could see them hitting $10000.
Where is the break even point? I still have G2 / G3 Proliant boxes running in production. Those are seven plus years old at this point. Even with warranty costs, and assuming you spend $10000 up front on the hardware, t
Re: (Score:2)
we run MS Terminal Services which is Citrix lite and the ratio is 10 people per server or so. I think the reason they run it is we serve big customers and they don't want to pay for network bandwidth to small offices to run local apps. but we don't run it with dumb terminals on the desktop. if the TS server crashed people would just run apps on the desktop.
if you run the dumb terminal deal it's still going to be way more expensive than buying and supporting desktops. Windows 7 works fine on 5 year old hardw
Re: (Score:2)
I wish Windows 7 ran fine on 5 year old hardware. Maybe the OS runs, but once you start running anything on top of the OS it is TERRIBLE. Luckily I don't really have to be concerned with licensing costs. I work for a 501c3 non-profit and Microsoft practically gives us software. It is the application licensing costs that kill us. Our CRM system cost us over $20,000 last year in licensing and maintenance/support.
Why did you go with Terminal Services over Citrix? Citrix seems to make it much easier to pu
Re: (Score:2)
I wish Windows 7 ran fine on 5 year old hardware. Maybe the OS runs, but once you start running anything on top of the OS it is TERRIBLE.
It does run fine on 5 year old hardware. Heck, with a video card upgrade, it runs quite usably on *10* year old hardware.
Re: (Score:2)
It seems like the limiting factor is the five year old hard drives. I'm not sure if perspective is changing, or if drives actually get slower over time. But the easiest upgrade for any old system that has 2GB of RAM already is to replace the hard drive with a newer one. I think a 5 year old system would run Windows 7 (with Aero turned off fine), as long as you have 2GB of RAM and a new drive.
As far as Citrix, Citrix costs money. It also adds an extra layer of things to go wrong. Citrix feels like the b
Re: (Score:2)
meant running physical hardware is cheaper. especially when some SQL queries request GB's of data
Re: (Score:1)
you can do a lot of things in VMWare to get over that hurdle, some supported by VMWare, and others not.
Re: (Score:2)
Where have you seen the dividing line materialize for the decision to keep it in house versus move it offsite?
When your costs are lower having it offsite than from supporting it internally, whether it's with internal IT staff or outsourced support. Just run total costs both ways. Don't forget to take intangibles into account though as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Still, no matter how many computers you buy and how expensive you make them, paying humans to keep them running is going to be the largest portion of IT costs.
The question is: do you want your organization to become a lean-n-mean specialist in ke
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Tell that to Amazon.com
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft sees the future and it is about to run them over. A lot of organizations don't want to eat the hardware costs associated with Office upgrades every three to five years. Microsoft is offering to host the applications online. From what I've heard about Office 2010, they aren't doing a very good job yet.
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 replicate
Re: (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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
I think you're right on target with your analysis of the situation. We always hear tales of Ballmer's rant about "Developers,
Re: (Score:2)
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 w
Trendy and Incompetent (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft has gotten very pathetic. They're investing billions researching a near-meaningless buzzword? Talk about grasping at straws.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You are a retard.
Which is more credible:
a) Microsoft pays very intelligent, very educated people ridiculous sums of money to make sound business plans and they realize cloud computing is going to be a major factor in the coming years.
b) Some dipshit on SlashDot is smarter than all these people and "knows" that cloud computing is just a "near-meaningless buzzword".
Jesus Christ. I can just see that ridiculous sneer on your fact over that unkempt, patchy bear that covers half your fat neck.
Re: (Score:2)
Why is this knee-jerk negative reaction every time cloud computing is mentioned on Slashdot?
Probably because the idea of moving computing into a "cloud" isn't that new, and the "cloud" is getting more and more mention in the mainstream press, and at that point PHBs "understand" it *and* it simultaneously becomes a useful word for marketing to use.
Plus, MS bragging about how much they spend "researching" something... blah blah "innovation" blah... is really a press release which is itself used by marketing to make something seem important. I'd venture that a fair chunk of that 9 billion is going
It's a hedge (Score:1)
Obvious question (Score:3, Interesting)
Has anyone checked to see if Microsoft has trademarked the word "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.
and patent applications (Score:1, Troll)
That money is also paying their patent lawyers to make patent thickets too.
Re:It's horseshit, not just research (Score:3, Interesting)
At a previous employer, I was asked by management to estimate how much time I spend doing "research", left undefined. The explanation - it's for tax purposes, and we can get a credit for research.
I'm not going to say I read the relevant laws to find the definition, but I did follow company policy and made a best guess based on what I thought should reasonably qualify under a sane tax system. So although I didn't claim anything that a normal person would call foul, I'm sure there were some hours that would
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...
Cloud Computing is perfectly secure. (Score:3, Funny)
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
An
Re: (Score:2)
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
Boss, what are you doing posting on /. ?
It sure isn't a +5 Funny post, its actually depressingly worrying.
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
In Praise of Microsoft R&D (Score:2)
I have no doubt that Microsoft's R&D is staffed with talented people.
I have my doubts that the Product Marketing and Sales side would turn any of it into anything of value though. In the history of innovative companies, they all tend to develop such powerful resistance to risk taking that all of the market potential in their R&D will just waste away.
Re: (Score:2)
I d. They show very little for the amount of money they spend.
Either the people aren't that talented, or motivated, ot the are focusing too much in a small amount of areas, or MS has no fucking idea how to take promising ides and get them out of the lab.
They can certainly buy something that someone else has managed to get to a small market.
I understand RnD is a tough nut to show progress, and I understand most RnD items will not pan out.
For the amount of money they spend in RnD, they sure to play catchup an
Lots of R&D $$$ yield ... nothing (Score:1, Insightful)
In the past ten years MS has probably spent $50B on R&D ... what does it have to show ?
Re: (Score:2)
$45B in gross profits this last year alone [yahoo.com], and growing...
Watch This (Score:3, Interesting)
When just yesterday
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/03/03/1947235/Ubuntu-Desktop-In-the-Cloud [slashdot.org]
Re:Watch This (Score:4, Informative)
Did you actually read the comments?
"Let's Open-Source the cloud (Score:2, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward writes: on Wednesday March 03, @08:50PM (#31349408)
Then we can run our own cloud and connect to it from wherever we want. There's a snowball's chance in hell I'm going to run my desktop on hardware that is out of my control, but for local applications, that might be interesting."
---
"Cost prohibitive? (Score:3, Insightful)
by bsDaemon (87307) writes: on Wednesday March 03, @09:00PM (#31349544)
EC2 charges based on CPU time and bandwidth usage, so this sounds like it'd end up eating up a monthly fee of ~$netbook per month. Why would anybody want to spend their money on this?"
---
"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"
---
No? Check.
Just felt like bitching? Check.
Re: (Score:2)
Just felt like bitching? Check.
Look at his posting history. Even his username. He's probably an M$ astroturfer trying to create the perception that slashdot is biased because it's independent and doesn't toe the M$ propaganda line.
Standard marketing technique; try to create the "everybody's doing it" vibe to break anti-M$ viewpoints and promote M$ propaganda. Every story about M$ has several posters claiming that /. is biased when there are always posts from all points of view. Many are simply people in M
They missed the internet rush (Score:1)
Back when MS missed getting in on the rise of the internet, they played catch-up for years. They didn't "get" the internet at first, and that cost them dearly for a while. To this day MS is not really known as an internet leader.
Back then it was obvious they weren't doing it right. And today they're still not doing it right because they've swung the other way, apparently, and overestimated the importance of cloud computing in the future. Oh well, it's their money and they can afford to flush it.
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure what you are talking about. Bill Gates was all about the power of the internet back in the day. Heck, IE DOMINATED the browser market, for what, like 10 years.
I think you might mean that they were misguided in what direction to go with it, but even as a Mac fan, I will concede that MS understood that the internet was important. They just had problems with execution and they sat on their laurels.
WTF? (Score:2)
It's widely known that Microsoft was notoriously slow on recognizing the importance of the internet [seattlepi.com].
Re: (Score:1)
Not sure what you are talking about. Bill Gates was all about the power of the internet back in the day. Heck, IE DOMINATED the browser market, for what, like 10 years.
Ahh, younglings.... Before your time there was a creature called Netscape. It was in those days that Microsoft was nowhere to be found and apparently mocked this internet thing as a fad.
Ancient history, I know, but us geezers need something to go on about besides lawns and snow-covered hills...
Re: (Score:2)
they didn't start taking it serious until after 1995. Way to be late to the party.
Lead or Follow? (Score:5, Interesting)
We're going to change and reinvent our company around leading in the cloud.
Going to lead in the cloud? Given that Google, Microsoft's most-direct competitor, has been "in the cloud" for quite some time, as the expertise to innovate and excel, and has the money to ensure they have everything they need, I find that to be a bold prediction founded in whimsy rather than fact. Methinks Microsoft is about four or five years too late to the cloud computing game. Sure, they have the resources to make up a lot of time but they're competing against a company that has similar resources who already has those four or five years (or more) head start.
That said, it is nice to see Microsoft recognizing that the world has changed and making efforts to change with it.
(And, no, that last part wasn't me being a smartass - I'm actually serious. It's a good thing when major corporations recognize the world has changed and adapt accordingly rather than attempting to hold on to a bygone era.)
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
my guess is there a lot of upper management in microsoft, each with their own vision of what the company should be. Each is trying to take the company into a different field/direction and become a "leader" in it when in actuality the only areas they have a solid lead in are still their core offerings, office and windows. i think this is a byproduct of weak leadership and an unclear vision.
i think to the average, non-technical person microsoft is still to them the company that makes just office/windows/(xbox
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
i think i read that Google Apps will cost you $50 per user per year. that's about the cost of MS Exchange and Office when amortized over 5 years. why change? than you have SOX issues like backups and having backups of data from years ago available to you
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.
Interesting turnaround (Score:5, Insightful)
Gates is as fearful as he is feared, and these days he worries most about the Internet, Usenet and the World Wide Web, which threaten his software monopoly by shifting the nexus of control from stand-alone computers to the network that connects them. The Internet, by design, has no central operating system that Microsoft or anybody else can patent and license. And its libertarian culture is devoted to open--that is to say, nonproprietary--standards, none of which were set by Microsoft.
Gates moved quickly this year to embrace the Net, although it sometimes seemed he was trying to wrap Microsoft's long arms around it.
I remember reading Gates' book "The Road Ahead" something like seven years ago and being surprised at how wrong he was in his estimation of the impact that mainstream Internet connectivity would have. I wish I could get the exact quotes, but there were a few telling sentences where he comes off pretty clearly as dismissive that net connectivity would become anything more than a cute PC accessory. I'm still not sure if that was his genuine line of reasoning, or of it was just wishful thinking, but I think the point was clear that Microsoft was stacking their chips against net-based services, insisting that locally-run software was going to be the way of the future.
Now they are investing in what Google has already been doing and doing well for years, following their trend of copying other business' models instead of innovating on their own. I'm sure this will work out well for them.
Re: (Score:2)
i use a lot of Google services and it's becoming annoying.
Gmail seems to take forever doing simple things like deleting emails. 10 seconds to delete 100 emails is way too long.
Google Reader has this annoying habit that you can't rename folders and you can't customize the size of the different areas of the screen.
Google Wave other than sucking real bad is slow. and it's a RAM hog. i've had Chrome at 600MB of RAM just on Google Wave.
Google Voice doesn't seem to have a purpose. why would i use it to call peopl
Re: (Score:2)
Just as good? Says someone who never compared vmware to MS hypervisor. I am no fan of VMware but their products are far superior to MS hypervisor.
Re: (Score:2)
Widespread bypassing of internet advertising. e.g. Strong AI that can be run from some future desktop computer, that searches through all the major search engines, picks the most relevant results from all of them, and arranges the links for you to visit. (Maybe only weak AI is needed?) But this would still require the visiting of search engines, so that would only really hurt Google if a superior competitor existed. Well no
Just another buzz? (Score:1)
Well ... cloud computing?
Basically it is the same technology that I have used for the last 15 years within the business.
People can call the technilogy whatever they want, it is still the same technology that drives the computercentre. It always has, it always will be, the rest is just code..
I think that cloudcomputing is good, dont get me wrong. It is just what I have been doing for the last 15 years....
Re: (Score:1)
oh .. typo .. technoligy should be technology .. :-P sorry for that ..
Ballmer's talk on cloud computing (Score:3, Interesting)
Where are academia's clouds? (Score:1)
With Amazon and Microsoft being businesses, hence for-profit, I was wondering if anyone has taken a stab at cloud R&D in academia.
Over 9 billion dollars (Score:2, Insightful)
They spend over 9 billion dollars on research, and we still need to buy add-on products to protect us from virus attacks.
Clouds are just vapor. (Score:1)
Just saying.....
Step 5, Profit? (Score:3, Interesting)
How is Microsoft going to make a profit in the cloud? The cloud is about the centralization and automatic configuration of vast amounts of computing resources. It will allow smaller companies to turn over their infrastructure management to cloud hosting companies.
When they were self-hosting, those smaller companies were often paying licensing fees to Microsoft because of some perceived cost benefit such as support or simplicity of administration. However, when shopping for cloud services, they don't need to worry about such details, and so they can focus much more on cost. A Windows based cloud hosting company would need thousands of licenses from Microsoft, and so they could save millions by using free software instead. These savings would lead to a huge price difference.
Microsoft could always offer special savings on bulk licenses, but they are going to have to offer major price drops. The centralization of hosting will give them far fewer direct customers. Where is the great amount of money to be made in this?
Their only hope is to offer things that can't be found in free software, or to reduce administrative costs enough to offset the cost of licenses. It will be a difficult challenge.
Re: (Score:2)
What are they getting for their money (Score:3, Insightful)
AT&T used to have an enormous R&D program. It invented transistors, UNIX, C, information theory, ... And they even won a couple of Nobel prizes. IBM wasn't AT&T, but they still made enormous contributions like RISC and relational databases. Micro$oft has done nothing.
Re: (Score:2)
hey, XMLHttpRequest isn't nothing.
Re: (Score:2)
Funny thing is they invented it and then they never used it!!
IIRC it was Google that was the first to exploit it on a wide basis with GMail.
Just goes to show MS can't spot a real innovation when they have one - even from their own labs...
I know it is an unpopular opinion but (Score:4, Interesting)
Great Achievement... (Score:2)
Instead (or because of that) they have to spend their time spreading FUD and threatening everyone with patent suits. Thank you, Microsoft!
Buzzwords are not vision (Score:1)
The problem Microsoft really has is a lack of vision. They've kinda made everything they have set out to make, and now they really don't have a grasp on what's next. Regardless of their size and resources, they aren't driving the industry the way they used to. Office is ok, and the ribbon bar is cool, for sure, but, it took them ten years of piling stuff into toolbars and menus and chasing around competitors u/i dongles in Office that they lost site of Office as a vision. Same can be said about Win7, VSt
Why DO you need a cloud anyway? (Score:1)
When even cell phones increasingly have the compute power of what desktops did a few years ago. The only reason you need a cloud is for data, and right now, data is still expensive to do over the internet. If longer lasting and higher capacity solid state drives become mainstream, even the data reason goes away as you can have all your data on your shelf, in the kitchen cabinet, your pocket at work, and so on, and even then, most people really don't need to store every single picture they took, forever.
$9 Billion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft gave $9 Billion to its R&D department?
Geez; how'd Steve Jobs convince them to donate that much?
Joni Mitchell said it best (Score:3, Funny)
You've looked at clouds from both sides now,
From up and down, and still somehow,
Nine billion dollars, I recall
You really don't know clouds, at all.
SharePoint (Score:2)
Other operating systems have pulled ahead and probably will continue to do so. Office has been nearly feature complete since Office 97 (which is perfectly serviceable for 99% of people), and Open Office will eventually get there, if it hasn't already. Internet Explorer continues to slip.
Microsoft continues to win in business software like Exchange and Outlook, and things that integrate with them. My guess is that they're putting a hell of a lot of money in SharePoint, because what other CMSs integrate th
Wasting Shareholder Money (Score:1)
How many billions of dollars have to be flushed down the toilet in Microsoft's attempt to gain new market strongholds?
It seems the best use of this money would be to give it back to the stockholers.
They're coming after Google Hard (Score:2)
It's like they JUST realized that they Google and Apple were the behemoths now and that MS is the underdog.
Yes. Sounds familiar. (Score:1)
Network PC anyone?
Well I guess someone has to spend money to prove it's not what we need. But seriously: what if MS wasn't around? That's the real question.
The "cloud" concept is bad news... (Score:2)
...tell me your local cable company won't start metering your internet access once your computer is replaced with a - déjà vu - dumb terminal. They'll have you by the short curlies, once you cannot do diddly-squat without a connection.
And once that happens, it will spiral out of control. If you believe otherwise, perhaps you might consider the possibility of some genius with a greedy streak at Verizon/Comcast/Time Warner/on Wall Street thinking "Hey, since we have metered access now, then why
THe Commercial Cloud: (Score:2)
= Perpetual micro-payments. Just like the cell phone industry.
Evil..
Some day the hacker party will begin w/ cloud (Score:2)
"Drug dealer spends $9 billion on 'research', (Score:2)
focuses on cloud."
Dealer: Shit, that’s the best stuff you ever smoked, Bill, isn’t it? ;)
Re:I am from India. (Score:4, Funny)
China.
Re: (Score:1)
Bangalore. Microsoft has a big shiny glass box of an office there. I am deeply sympathetic with your fate and hope you will survive it.
Re:I am from India. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And we don't have thousands of home machines lassoed into a botnet (and by definition compromised).
For the vast, vast majority of users their data will be safer in "the cloud" than it will be on their hard disk on their laptop or desktop.