Greener Pastures

Without going into the whole discussion going on over on one of the Yahoo Groups, I will interject some thoughts here. Why not over there, too much over talking!!!

Anyway the general consensus is that the cloud is built, it is out there, and cloud computing will take over the IT industry and ultimately Information Assets will become the property of business but controlled by trusted hosting providers. That's probably true, to some degree, and that is less a factor of desire on the part of the business world, and more a factor of developers moving their R&D that way. The model is pretty simple, and in a utopian internet world, there's nothing really to worry about. Sure there's hackers, and industrial or even patriotic espionage to worry about, but that threat changes very little in a cloud based world versus a premises based world. No I see it as something a little more Facsist…Businesses controlling governments and the lives of people for profit. I am reminded back to when Abbie, a CPA worked for a VERY LARGE regional construction company. They used a hosted terminal based accounting application…which is to say their windows desktops had a terminal application that connected to a main-frame hosted application in a remote hosted data center. The company 'shared resources' at the data center to for benefit. Increased availability, standardized management and probably most importantly, set and stable IT costs…great! The problem lay in the fact that the construction did not own access to the data. Theoretically the data was theirs but it could not be imported into other systems or even accessed and manipulated for special reports or anything. The hosted application and more critically the hosting company CONTROLLED ALL ACCESS TO THE CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES DATA. Sure, they could pay for special reports to be written by the developers, but that was an arduous task that took far toooooooo long, and cost far tooooooooo much money!

The point is that the idea of a cloud based business environment has been around FOR A LONG TIME. It is maturing enough to start threatening small business consultants' market share. My feeling is that until there is a defined business model for Partners and consultants to earn a living off recommending Cloud Computing, this will not make a marked impact on the SMB space. Look at Google Apps or Salesforce.com. There is more hype around it these days than in past and more fear because Microsoft has announced its intentions of blowing up in that space as well. Perhaps rather than worrying about Cloud Computing competing for $$$ SBSCs should keep it as a part of their solution portfolio…Cloud Computing will mature, but I see it not as a replacement, especially in the largest sections of the marketplace, but as an augmentation for the existing solutions set.

By far the MOST Powerful feature of SharePoint Designer, specifically when combined with Windows SharePoint Services on a site, is the Data Views. We have been developing a new product line, and consistently through the process I am called upon to 'consolidate' data from a variety of sources, but for me as a pseudo developer the manipulation of RSS feeds to build an interactive consumer of data is phenomenal. Imagine a dashboard with all your social networks in one place. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo 360, Windows Live Spaces as well as the Corporate SharePoint. So for a business you might say, I don't want my people on MySpace or Facebook or Freindster all day long. Well, by bringing in data in clean RSS feeds and controlling interactions with that, now the Dangers of those sites is diminished. Extend that to interacting with your customers and others in their demographic, consuming and mining data from these social networks and mashing that together into a cohesive 'picture' of your target market, coupled with your business, and apply your business rules against that, and the Power of Web 2.0 starts to shine through!!!

We have a far less sinister view of Web 2.0, but imagine at home having a 'dashboard' that consolidates all your social networks, along with GPS of where the kids are and a phonebook and a consolidated calendar of everything going on around you…now it gets REAL FUN!!! Consolidated views of your day, from TV schedule, to Soccer Practice and where, and who else is on the team, with addresses, phones, and emails, and what snacks you need for the Party tomorrow night…without having to 'go' all over the virtual world inside your PC and the Internet. The dashboard can bring that all in to you.

Those concepts are the stuff that dreams are made of. It is a fulfillment of the potential of all this computing power!!! We aren't there today, but the sick thing is, that it is finally possible to start making it come true. A dashboard that feeds you as you are. If you aren't on MySpace, fine, it ain't feeding your dashboard. If your son is on Friendster or your daughter's soccer team has its own portal, the dashboard will bring that to you, rather than you having to remember to go out there and get it.

That's the beauty of Data Views. And with a little prowess, a developer can take those views and stitch them together to make interactive applications, hosted internally on a corporate web server, externally on a portal site, or at the house, or in the community center…bringing the data you need to you, when you need it, in a meaningful manner.

Please review: http://blogs.msdn.com/mssmallbiz/archive/2009/01/08/9299276.aspx

will you be answering why a customer would by from me, when they can go to costco and get a better deal?

Exhibit A: http://www.costco.com/Common/Category.aspx?whse=BC&Ne=5000001&eCat=BC|1892&N=4019675+4294967208&Nr=P_CatalogName:BC&Ns=P_Price|1||P_SignDesc1&lang=en-US&topnav=

Really, I am curious, because with 0 effort, ANYONE can get Office Small Business Edition Retail Box Upgrade for $150.99. I have lost several sales of Volume Licensing in the past 3 months because of SH!T like this. And before you say oh well it's an Upgrade, which means it must be following a licensed copy…from the web site:

Exhibit B:

Please note that practically anything from Works to full Office counts, and what PC sold in the last 8/9 years did not come with at least Works or Word on it??? So please note OEM is included… The reality is that customers, in cost conscious times could care less about a version or a whatever, they want it CHEAP, and if they can pay for my services with the $$$ saved by buying retail upgrades all day long, then they are gonna do it! So Eric, if you can tell us how to combat that $150.99 for Office Small Business Edition Retail Upgrade, then great.

Please note, everyone reading this, that Microsoft's goal is to get product sold. They really and truly don't care how, so long as it's legit, as long as product is on the desktop, server, infrastructure, phones, tour wristwatch etc., they really don't care. I do like the idea of making some dough along the way, but I don't know that I can look a client in the face, and tell them that buying from an SBSC, even through the Big Easy, is actually a better deal than that above…

And lest you think well it's just at Costco, keep your eyes and ears pinned, because it's gonna be everywhere REAL soon. New products are coming, and Product Managers are gonna be under the gun to move product to keep their job, much less bonus, so these deals are gonna be EVERYWHERE VERY SOON!!! The Competion ain't from open-office or corel or IBM's suite of stuff, it's from inside Microsoft and it ain't gonna stop!!!