Interesting news that Microsoft president of its Platform and Services division Kevin Johnson is leaving the company. Apparently he’s heading over to become CEO of Juniper Networks, the manufacturer of networking hardware. As Om reports, this hire, and some other recent ones, point to a shift in strategy for Juniper.
So what’s the relevance for a blog that talks about SaaS? As a commenter reminded us, "expensive routers are nothing more than software wrapped in expensive hardware". So it’s natural that Juniper would want a CEO with software experience.
There is also some rumour that Juniper is considering offering SaaS apps for network management/QoS. Excellent - hardware plus services - H+S
Now all this is really interesting for those in the network management industry, but even more interesting is to see how flexible even big businesses are becoming in terms of there strategies. Now only yesterday I lambasted Foldera for it’s bizarre turn-on-a-dime strategy shift, but this Juniper shift, if it eventuates, is a smart move.
It’s about finding core competencies and augmenting the scope of those competencies - if you make network hardware, which includes some smart embedded software, it’s a smart and obvious move to introduce some external software offerings that both add to the existing offerings, leverage off the successes of the existing offerings and simultaneously provide some discrete diversified revenue opportunities. Nice move - watch this space.
As RWW reported, Google docs was down for 30 minutes last week. Part of the RWW included a poll asking respondents what sort of downtime would make them reconsider using Google docs. The results are even more interesting considering that RWW’s readership is arguably more likely to be users of on-demand apps than the general public.
Microsoft insider Steve Clayton posted, and questioned whether or not the results indicated an unwillingness of users to really put their faith in purely online services. He goes on to say that;
That’s why Microsoft thinks a Software plus Services approach is the right one. You get the best of both worlds.
This isn’t a slight against Google particular but more an observation that the battleground of cloud computing is in its infancy…The announcements this week around Microsoft Online are a first salvo in what promises to be a whole new era here at Microsoft. Let the games commence!
Of course the logical response to Steve’s comment is that with Google gears, docs is no longer a purely online service, and in fact falls within the broad definition of S+S. And yes he’s right, outages of SaaS products do show why applications with a pure cloud base are sub-optimal. This of course isn’t a reason to throw the baby out with the bath water and go back to desktop apps - it is however a major heads up for SaaS vendors to think about offline access.
Kaila bought my attention to a Silicon Alley post that is a pretty stark assertion about Google. It seems an anonymous Silicon Valley insider claims that it’s not just Yahoo with significant internal strife, he claims Microsoft, eBay and Google also have problems. He is quoted as saying;
Google’s a complete f–ing mess on the inside. A total f–ing trainwreck. They don’t talk to each other. They fight constantly. A lot is being pissed away. In three or four years you’ll be looking back at this company and wondering what happened
Now it has to be said that Google is an exceptionally profitable trainwreck at the moment, but it also has to be said that most (nearly all) of that profit comes from one source - Adwords. It only needs a successful advertising foray by Microsoft to remove significant amount of the Google fairy dust.
As Kaila so rightly points out, and to paraphrase something I said a few days ago in relation to another company, when you’re big it’s easy for people to throw rocks at you. Google has grown so meteorically that they’re bound to trip up - admittedly it’s been a week full of trips for Google, but they’re so in the public view that every move they make is watched.
I don’t think Google will fall any time soon - I do however think that people need to think about a post Adwords revenue stream for the Googlers (and I’m sure they’re at the ‘plex right now doing just that)
When Microsoft revealed Equipt the other day (Diversity coverage here) there was much discussion as to whether it amounted to the totality of MS’s SaaS offering).
Well we didn’t have to wait long for an answer. At its worldwide partner conference in Houston this week, MS announced definitive road map and pricing for it’s next tranche of hosted applications. It’s bad news for the resellers but good news for on-demand as a class.
The offerings are targeted at business users and come in two flavours, Business Productivity Online and Deskless Worker. Microsoft is taking a broadside at Google here, trying to stem the flow of users moving to Google docs - unfortunately until MS adds it’s office productivity apps to it’s on-demand offerings, it will seem like a disjointed approach - while these tools allow subscription based on-demand use of SharePoint and live meeting, they do not as yet allow true on-demand office productivity app usage.
The offerings are thus far enablers for telecommuting allowing hosted email, calendaring and IM/presence. As an attempt to sweeten the offering for corporate IT departments, MS will deploy a simple interface which will allow rapid set up of these tools for new workers. A limited beta signup is available here.
MS has tried to appease resellers by offering kick-backs on the subscription fee, but it’s hard to imagine that there will be many very happy resellers out there - sensing the beginning of the end for their hyper lucrative business models.
Below is a diagram of the MS offerings announced thus far.
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