Microsoft and a New Cloud Formation
January 15, 2010
A few days ago we tried to access one of the small and mid sized business download sites operated by Microsoft. It seemed to be on holiday. Today I read the CNet report about Web market share. The article “Google Rules Search in December, Bing Drops” provided some numbers showing Google widened its lead in Web search. One comment that struck me was:
Google accommodated almost 6.7 billion queries, capturing a 67.3 percent share of the month’s searches.
I don’t believe these data for one Kentucky Wildcat minute. What I do believe is that the decision engine, a cloud service, is drifting off. But the interesting cloud news was the tie up between HP and Microsoft. I know that Microsoft was not too keen on other vendors’ hardware, particularly when it ships with Linux. I also heard that Microsoft’s data centers have some HP hardware. Now the companies are, according to “HP’s Hurd Calls $250m Microsoft Agreement ‘Breakthrough Stuff,” teaming for a cloud computing play. Allegedly $250 million will be invested to “better integrate corporate software and hardware.”
Simplifying life for corporate information technology professionals is one objective. And the money:
will be spent across a range of areas — including email servers, database management, and cloud computing — to make HP’s hardware work smoothly with Microsoft’s software in a wider variety of settings.
My view is that cloud computing can simplify * some * IT challenges. But the complexities of SharePoint and Microsoft Fast Search won’t really go away. In the cloud, these will be hidden and someone has to pay for the engineers who have to keep these puppies from misbehaving. An investment on this scale suggests that Microsoft knows it has some gaps to fill in cloud computing, but I don’t think HP type engineering will resolve these. Some of those former Alta Vista guys would probably be able to make a contribution in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2010
Full disclosure: I am sitting with Tess and Tyson. Both are asleep. No one paid me to point out that putting complex systems in the cloud does not resolve their complexity nor the cost of dealing with that complexity. “Cloud”, you say. I am under the thumb of NOAA.
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