Tag Archive for 'S+S'

Peeling the onion - Microsoft’s S+S..

Published by Ben Kepes on July 9, 2008 in Business, Collaboration, Design, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 2 Comments

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.

ms-webapps

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Microsoft gets a trifecta!

Published by Ben Kepes on April 23, 2008 in Design, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 0 Comments

I’d avoided posting about Microsoft’s latest offering, Albany, because there is really not much anyone in the SaaS world can find to say about it…. I can’t resist however so here goes.

Basically it seems that Albany is a way to derive some revenue out of existing products that aren’t doing so well. There are a few “innovations” -  Microsoft has changed the pricing model (suggestions are that it’ll be a $12 month service), and they’re building some kind of wrapper whereby users can have a one click set up of their product (although it’s not an ERP system they’re selling here, just how many clicks are needed to set up Zoho or Google apps anyway?).

The other “value-add” is that along with the subscription, users have the right to download later versions of the bloat software as they become available, the fact that Office tends to release cycle only once or twice a decade kind of leads me to say that up to date office productivity software isn’t a huge issue for most users. Add to that the fact that already MS office includes about 10 times the functionality that most users need and you’ve got a feature of very dubious benefit.

The bottom line (and something that MS strategists should really point out to those making these product decisions) is as follows;

  • Those who need all of Office’s super functionality will continue to use top shelf versions of MS office (read enterprise users)
  • Those who need a lightweight, simple and cheap alternative will use just that - Google apps, Zoho or one of the other offerings - Albany is neither lightweight, simple nor cheap, an unfortunate trifecta

I know Microsoft’s strategy is one of software + services and they’ll argue that Albany is just that - but it feels like a service offering that is there simply to fit into the S+S moniker - not for any real reasons…

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