Okay, so we've been told so many times that Microsoft is staying Personal Computer-oriented and not going Web 2.0 and keeping it that way...
That's all well and good and i've read so many articles saying that is the way it should be...
And then I walk down to the city and read that Microsoft is releasing Azure alongside the supposedly PC-based Windows 7. Now in case you hadn't noticed, Azure is not PC-based.
For those uneducated of you, Azure is a system that actually replaces Office, and other apps with a server-side system of 'cloud apps' that each user could 'connect' to in order to empower their computer's abilities.
There are two problems with this. First up, why buy Office for a couple extra features. I'm paying $450-odd dollars for the ability to make a mail-merge (oh yeah, i do those all the time). Releasing Azure as part of a product range made for PC's, is like giving a gun to prison inmate, it just guarantees that things are gonna screw up.
Second problem, unless they do things like shipping computers with it, setting defaults to it, or integrating it with Win7, i find it difficult to believe that anything Microsoft comes up with will be more successful than Google's efforts.
They do have one thing going for them but, Google is a bit of a 'fringe' company compared to Microsoft. The other bigger thing is that Microsoft's monopoly (yes, it's a monopoly) on shipping OS's means that every copy of Windows will encourage and coerce every Windows user to begin using Azure rather than begin using Google. While previous Google users will probably continue to use Google Apps/Docs, new cloud users will be likely to move toward a system thats designed to integrate with almost every single computer on the planet. While Chrome users will be familiar with the concept of web applications and shortcuts as will anybody who has used an eee PC (by ASUS). This is a great idea, being able to run cloud apps off a local terminal, but it is a bit of a problem for Google since every Windows user will be able to run Azure as if it was Office and probably have it interact locally with their machine.
It will be a sad day, when Google Docs calls it quits, and by then it will be Netscape all over again...
That's all well and good and i've read so many articles saying that is the way it should be...
And then I walk down to the city and read that Microsoft is releasing Azure alongside the supposedly PC-based Windows 7. Now in case you hadn't noticed, Azure is not PC-based.
For those uneducated of you, Azure is a system that actually replaces Office, and other apps with a server-side system of 'cloud apps' that each user could 'connect' to in order to empower their computer's abilities.
There are two problems with this. First up, why buy Office for a couple extra features. I'm paying $450-odd dollars for the ability to make a mail-merge (oh yeah, i do those all the time). Releasing Azure as part of a product range made for PC's, is like giving a gun to prison inmate, it just guarantees that things are gonna screw up.
Second problem, unless they do things like shipping computers with it, setting defaults to it, or integrating it with Win7, i find it difficult to believe that anything Microsoft comes up with will be more successful than Google's efforts.
They do have one thing going for them but, Google is a bit of a 'fringe' company compared to Microsoft. The other bigger thing is that Microsoft's monopoly (yes, it's a monopoly) on shipping OS's means that every copy of Windows will encourage and coerce every Windows user to begin using Azure rather than begin using Google. While previous Google users will probably continue to use Google Apps/Docs, new cloud users will be likely to move toward a system thats designed to integrate with almost every single computer on the planet. While Chrome users will be familiar with the concept of web applications and shortcuts as will anybody who has used an eee PC (by ASUS). This is a great idea, being able to run cloud apps off a local terminal, but it is a bit of a problem for Google since every Windows user will be able to run Azure as if it was Office and probably have it interact locally with their machine.
It will be a sad day, when Google Docs calls it quits, and by then it will be Netscape all over again...
2 comments:
* Mail merges: Look at the measliness of the wikipedia article.
* Microsoft is too much a monopoly. It is actually (bit of random trivia here) the first bug in the Ubuntu development system, which Mark Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is designed to fix. </trivia> More stories about the monopoly on my blog.
* Google Docs is terrible anyway. OpenOffice is at least five times more popular than Docs. Unless Azure is really good in terms of cloud software, no one will use it. Fewer even if they need to pay for it.
You are missing the point here, Google Docs is a cloud suite, a Web 2.0 App.
It can run anywhere, anytime with an internet connection and a half decent browser.
OpenOffice may be better, but it is a local app suite. it must be downloaded (which requires internet anyway), installed, run, configured before you can use it, and if you use multiple machines, you have to keep all of them up-to-date. OpenOffice also relies on local storage where Google Docs can keep all your documents in the cloud...
Different concept, different execution, different results...
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