Newsmaker: Gates scopes out the business landscape

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At one point, Bill, you said Microsoft is focusing on consumer services now, but that there's actually more opportunity for business-oriented services. What shape might some of those services take? I mean, FrontBridge might be one example.
Gates: Well, for most companies, if you think of their IT budget, a lot of the money goes (to) personnel costs today, where you're managing systems server by server. A lot of the automation of making operations simpler can be done for on-premise or off-premise. And the main reason hosted will make sense is where you just want to get something up and running very quickly. If you don't think you can get the IT expertise within your business, then the off-premise (version) may be attractive. The things that people still have to feel very good about is that they still have control over how quickly things get done on their behalf, how their information is maintained. If there's not enough resources there that they get to choose what can and can't run, they still have that administrative control that they can do integration.

Everything Microsoft does, over time, will be available either running as a server or you can run it on-premise or it can be hosted.

The industry is going through that evolution. E-mail and Web sites have been the easiest things to say, OK, I understand my administrative boundaries and my integration boundaries for e-mail and Web sites. Of the stuff that's hosted today, those would be over 90 percent of it. Instead of buying a copy of SQL Server, I just want to open up and do a set of databases in the cloud. We'll get to that point where that's a very typical thing, particularly if you just want to try something out, you know, get it up and running quickly and then you might shift back later. The ideal for the industry is going to be if we have one architecture that (allows) you to shift things back and forth between on-premise and off-premise very easily, because it doesn't take much in terms of these various factors to make you want to switch in one direction or the other.

Are services like Windows Live and Office Live going to become more oriented towards midsize and larger businesses, or are those same types of approaches not as germane to larger organizations?
Gates: I do think there will be a tendency to have more on-premise with larger businesses than there are with smaller businesses. And consumers are sort of the extreme, but even there you'll still have servers in the house that are holding videos and music. Now, the administrative model of, if there's an error that comes up on that server, is it somebody in that house who has to look at that error message, or is there somebody they've got a relationship with who can look at it and diagnose it for them? That's kind of like hosted, when you're able to remote all the management of the thing. And in the history of software, people have been doing forms for that remote management stuff, you know, going back to before Microsoft even existed. Now, as we're making the software hostable, we're also saying even when you run it on-premise, if you give me permission and we have the right relationship, I can be examining the health of the thing and helping deal with certain types of issues that come up, even though it's your hardware, it's on-premise.

Some of that remote management technology is in Vista, right?
Gates: Remote assistance is (in) Windows XP, but it didn't work well through firewalls, and so now we've improved that and we think that will be a lot more mainstream than it is today. Most tech support calls today are still voice, you know, picking up the phone and describing what's on a screen to somebody at the end of the phone line. It should be that you're sharing that screen or you just describe the problem and that remote person takes over. So we're seeing that evolution of better software capability for letting the remote expertise be applied, no matter where the code is running.  

More Newsmakers

[theoscnet]

Everything is just SUPER in Redmond!

"We're super happy with the growth"

"I mean, we perform super, super, super well."

(Our) software can scale up to cover a super, super high percentage of all businesses in the world

"how they take the updates in and when they pass them along to their systems--we've done super well on that,"

Reminds me of the days of Super Nintendo
Everything was just Super!

I'm just suprised a "super-duper" didn't get stuck in there somewhere, too...

Sorry, I thought that article was quite funny, just pokin fun...

[Earl Benser]

Gates is mightily impressed.....

...... Let's hope that there is actually something to impress the rest
of us.

But, from the Redmond blogs, maybe not this time.....

[Stomfi]

CEO Speak

These comments by Gates are obviously for the intellectually challenged, who need clever sounding words in a childish language they can understand and pass on to fellow CEOs and users of a similar ilk.
Unfortunately today, this seems to be the majority of the population, although Gates has always believed his supporters come from the ranks of those who can only understand what he does.
Sadly for Microsoft's customers, his "vision" is limited. (He rewrites things when he is proven wrong, like how he had to invent the world wide web when that didn't eventuate as a fad.)
New technologies are happening thick and fast in the latter part of this decade no matter how hard MS tries to put on the breaks, a strategy that has worked well for them so far. But advances in computing hardware coupled with open source software that can't be marginalised by the Gates money pot, look like numbering the days for a stand alone networked desktop system even in the home.
A huge problem for the Windows solution is that it is not cross platform and its application software does not run as well on other operating systems. Gates is trying to solve this problem with a web based solution, but instead of using a standard development platform like say Java, their "must be invented or owned here" strategy, has forced them to use something that anecdotal evidence suggests is inferior and insecure.
But like the old IBM before them, business leaders and the masses seem to think that big is best, so he knows he has their ear until the switch to more modern technologies and strategies by the end of this decade, marginalises his business model instead.