You have to hand it to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. He sees Google and Amazon ramping up their Apps Engine and EC2 cloud-based computing infrastructures, and knows that’s where the market is heading. He’s trying to pilot his company slowly away from the old paradigm of thick clients and bloated desktop software and toward more nimble browser-based applications running in the cloud. It’s just that his entire business is built on that bloated desktop software. And anything Microsoft offers for the cloud could conceivably cannibalize that core business. While Microsoft may say its offering something called “Windows Cloud,” Windows is really the opposite of cloud computing. And Ballmer will have his hands full reconciling the two.
Ballmer’s hints about the lack of capability of the new “Windows Cloud” OS are especially telling. Instead of retooling Microsoft’s core applications to run in the cloud, Ballmer says Windows Cloud will just “augment” those core applications with some Web functionality. So, on the order of what we’ve seen so far with SharePoint, Exchange and CRM, most functions will still require a thick desktop client. Any Web functionality will be just a nice-to-have adjunct, separate from the core capability.
Ballmer also cautions that Microsoft won’t be offering the full functionality of its flagship Office suite in the cloud. Instead, users can expect the ability to do some “light editing” from a public Internet kiosk, and that’s about it. He says users need richer features than can be delivered via the cloud, adding:
“We want software more powerful than software that runs in a browser.”
OK, but how is that cloud computing? It sounds more like a way to slap the word ‘cloud’ on something that’s leans much heavier toward thick-client Windows. While Google and Amazon continue to add more functionality to their cloud-based offerings, Microsoft is stuck figuring out which functions to move to the cloud and which to keep on the desktop to preserve its investment in Windows. It’s providing more of a cloud-lite offering. Maybe a better name for Windows Cloud would be Windows Shade.
