The media sells the Google cloud. The enterprise buys Microsoft on-premises
There's a big disconnect between what the media likes to write about and what the enterprise likes to buy. I suspect this is largely because the future is a much more interesting topic. Enterprise software might be a great topic for advertisers for Lunesta or Ambien, but it's woefully dull for everyone else.
So, the media talks about PHP and other Web-scripting languages, but stodgy chief information officers continue to buy Java and .Net.
The money is still in on-premise software for Microsoft and others.
And while cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in technology media, the vast majority of IT decisions center on which on-premise software solution to buy.
This is Microsoft's big problem ("We're not sexy! We're addicted to on-premises software!"), as well as its opportunity ("We're not sexy! We're safe!"). Microsoft makes great enterprise software. No, it's not perfect. But Microsoft more than any other company has made great strides to lower the cost of computing for enterprises.
Microsoft is now getting squeezed by open source, but I suspect it would rather compete against Google Apps than open-source software, because Microsoft has one huge advantage over Google, one that Microsoft doesn't have over open source:
Data security.
Google has gone on an advertising blitz to knock off Microsoft Office, as CNET reports, but it faces an uphill battle because the heart of enterprise computing is security. Security is boring, yes, but as ZDNet's Larry Dignan writes, "If you're in a heavily regulated industry you're not going to be e-mailing Google's help desk trying to track a 2006 e-mail to satisfy a Sarbanes-Oxley requirement."
It's possible that this is just a transitory issue that will dissipate with time as the benefits of cloud computing (fungibility of the computing experience with data following users from device to device) overcome its perceived shortcomings.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the San Jose Mercury News that Google has not traditionally had much collaboration with Microsoft, but perhaps it would do well to figure out how to tie Google cloud offerings into Microsoft on-premise solutions, as it's starting to do with its Gmail service that ties into an Outlook front end.
The reality is that Google and Microsoft may have more to gain from stasis in the near term than disrupting each other's businesses.
Regardless, in the short term, no matter how much the media and Google sell the cloud, it remains an add-on to corporate computing, not a replacement strategy.
I'm a believer in the cloud, as there's plenty of evidence that it's growing. But I think Microsoft has near-term threats like open source, and longer-term threats, like Google's cloud strategy.
Google is a threat. But Microsoft has time to improve its Azure story (cloud plus on-premise computing) before it hits the panic button.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
On premises search, now there is a battleground I would like to see a lot more competition over.
As always new tech "seems" like an add-on for old tech. Remember the TN5270 app for OS/2 (for mainframe comunication) or even Microsoft's Web Windows Terminal clients.
In the end, good new tech does replace (for all practical terms) old tech, but then again, many predicted the end of the mainframe era before 2000 and there's still a healthy need for COBOL programmers.
As for the security stuff, that's also the main reason (or "excuse") most banks argue when confronted on a need to switch to Windows, Unix or Linux. In the end, the cost of maintaining high paid professionals on obsolete technologies is what makes most companies switch in the end.
Cloud's time IS COMING, but not yet (for the rest of us).
In many cases, there just isn't enough cost benefit (if any at all) to justify losing that control over your resources.
Things like hosted exchange and hosted share point are VERY attractive because of the high overhead associated with managing those systems, but you give up a SIGNIFICANT amount of control. Example, with my current employer we have to run a manual filter for the GAL of each user which is something that wouldn't work if we were to go with a hosted solution.
Google often sells on price while Microsoft tries hard to focus on the solution - one key difference between Microsoft and Google and probably why Google has nothing but a hard, long, uphill climb to get anywhere close to Microsoft.
On the comment by MasterBlasters... does Google have an on-premise mail solution from a server perspective? I think not.
This is often relative decline. The IBM mainframe business is still nice and profitable, it just hasn't grown much in 20 years. Almost no applications are built for it, and certainly no ISV's base their business model on it. The Cloud is early, but inevitable. Much of it will be private, some of it will be public. But it will all work the same, and very little of it will be powered by Microsoft technology.
VMware (probably), Xen, KVM will get the infrastructure layer, and the app layer will be an opensource hybrid of Java, Python, & Ruby, all managed by open source management software -- some SaaS some private -- and developed with open source tools -- some SaaS some private.
I see VMWare vs. MS progressing similarly to Novell vs. MS. Novell just did it better for quite a while, but Microsoft stepped up, and while thier solution may not have been better from a hard core standpoint, it did provide the need while integrating well with thier platform. I see Hyper-V doing the same thing. It just works well with thier systems, once they get the back-end feature set on-par with VMware, I expect them to take off, and 10 years from now VMWare and Citrix will be nitch markets.
Ruby, PHP, AJAX and all that are all very good at what they do but Matt and a lot of other people are making the mistake of thinking that they're some sort of magic solution that's going to sweep away all the old in favour of some magical new age where everything's 'new and improved'. As baetica points out, just because something is newer, doesn't mean it makes the old tech obsolete.
C still has its place in systems and embedded programming (as does Assembly) and it's giong to be nigh-on impossible to shift C++ out of performance programming within the next decade unless D turns out to be as much of an improvement as its creator claims. In the same way, Java and .Net are still going to be used heavily for the forseeable future because there are a great many things all these web-oriented languages just can't do.
After all, ASP was around long before C# yet MS still created C# because the demand was there and its takeup in the enterprise has been huge so I should hardly think these same organisations are not using web methods because of entrenched tech. If that were the case, they wouldn't use C# either.
No, the truth is that all this web tech is useful in small areas but otherwise it's horrendously limited.
What is clear is that cloud computing has *not yet* hit that inflection point, despite the technology media's love of the paradigm. And there are still significant obstacles to it becoming adopted as the dominant paradigm, both for cloud computing customers and cloud computing vendors. The article is a good reminder that the hype does not equal the reality, at least at this point in time.
Fear the cloud ( tm) I say
- by TheQG August 4, 2009 7:59 PM PDT
- "Google has literally taken the war to the streets, announcing their ?Go Google? advertising campaign. Their plan is to run actual billboard ads (yes, on the sides of highways) in Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. The ads will be changed each day and will focus on highlighting the frustrations that come with using Microsoft?s Office. Google hopes to push users and companies into making the switch to their Google Apps product, taking a major piece of what has always been Microsoft?s pie."
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