Microsoft offers confusing viewpoints on SaaS

By Microsoft Subnet on Thu, 03/06/08 - 3:46pm.

Microsoft is making a concerted effort to move itself towards a software-as-a-service model, Microsoft Subnet blogger Mitchell Ashley believes, "But lets face it. Microsoft has a long, long way to go," he says. Part of the problem is that Microsoft seems unwilling to acknowledge that the Linux platform (and to some extent, the Google cloud) is where so much of the SaaS action is today.

Ashley conducted a candid interview with Michael van Dijken, head of Microsoft's marketing efforts in the hosting and communications sectors while at the SaaS Summit 2008 conference in San Francisco. (Ashley posted a "micro-interview podcast" of the meeting in his "Converging on Microsoft" blog.). van Dijken works with network providers, media and entertainment companies, and service providers/hosted services. His views on how Microsoft, open source and SaaS fit together were disappointing: Windows Server 2008 and the latest versions of Visual Server and SQL Server are the big opportunities for developers, even in the Web space, he said.

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