Microsoft and Business Intelligence That Sells
November 19, 2015
I read “Microsoft’s Graph Wants to Turn User Data into Business Intelligence It Can Sell.” The write up is interesting because Microsoft has been laboring in the information access vineyards for decades. The products produced are somewhat different from the products of other data vintners in my opinion. The other point is that Microsoft, if the article is accurate, wants to sell information, not software and cloud services, subscriptions to Office, and mobile phones. Wait. Maybe not mobile phones. What will Microsoft be selling?
I learned:
What it [Microsoft] would like to do is to take your user information and use it in much the same way that Google reads your email to understand when your flight is going to leave, or Microsoft’s Cortana tracks packages. What Google doesn’t have access to, though, is all that information you’ve tucked away into Office: not just email, but documents, OneNote notes, and the like. As the original Office Graph names suggests, Microsoft sees the Graph first as a business tool. Entire companies have already been built around the sort of business intelligence that Microsoft hopes to provide, whether it be customer-relationship management, logistics, or sales analysis tools. Microsoft hopes to take its Office contextual data and provide it as a service to third parties. Eventually it could take data from a company like Salesforce, integrate it with the Office data, and provide a richer mix of data back to its customers. Currently, its partners include Do.com, SkyHigh Networks, Smartsheet, and OfficeAtWork.
Microsoft has some interesting ideas. Does the future of Microsoft include search and SharePoint. Sketching plans for the future are interesting and often enjoyable. Delivering is a different exercise. The monitoring functions of Windows 10 hint at some of the questions Microsoft will have to address. Reality and the future are often difficult to reconcile with Alphabet-Google’s and other firms’ efforts.
Stephen E Arnold, November 19, 2015
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Microsoft and Business Intelligence That Sells : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search