Ballmer bets Microsoft's future on the cloud
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Seventy percent of the 40,000 people who work on
software at Microsoft are in some way working in the cloud, CEO Steve Ballmer
said Thursday at the University of Washington.
"A year from now, that will be 90 percent,"
he said.
In a wide-ranging talk to computer science students at
the university, Ballmer explained why he thinks cloud computing is important
and how Microsoft aims to take advantage of the trend toward hosted computing
services.
"Our inspiration, our vision ... builds from this
cloud base," he said. "This is the bet, if you will, for our
company."
All Microsoft products including Windows, Office, Xbox,
Azure, Bing, and Windows Phone are driven by the idea of being connected to the
cloud, he said. While some recently introduced products like Windows 7 included
a lot of work that is not cloud-based, the inspiration for the product starts
with the cloud, he said.
Beyond software, Ballmer also described Microsoft's
different strategies for creating devices that connect to cloud-based services.
"The cloud wants smarter devices," he said.
He admitted mistakes in the way that Microsoft historically approached the mobile market, giving hardware makers a wide range
of potential for form factors. "We didn't standardize enough. The
cacophony of form factors for you, the user, was too high," he said.
Microsoft has unveiled a new version of its mobile
software, Windows Phone 7, which has a much stricter set of hardware
requirements. Still, it should have more options for hardware makers to
innovate than some Microsoft competitors like Apple and Research In Motion
where "you get what they choose to build for you," Ballmer said.
In the case of its Xbox gaming console, Microsoft uses
that same strategy. But Ballmer hinted that there could be some variety with
the Xbox. "You might have more form factors in the future for different
price points and options," he said.
Ballmer also said that Microsoft wants to help foster
the development of different cloud computing services, both private and public.
"How does the cloud become something that not just Microsoft and four
other companies run on the behalf of the whole planet? How do we give the cloud
back to you?" he said. "You should be able to, if you want, run your
own cloud."
In some cases Microsoft may be eager to help
organizations run their own hosted environments because it doesn't make sense
for the company to do so itself. For instance, a government might have
regulations that hosted data be kept within the country's borders. But in a
small country, Microsoft may not be interested in making the investment.
"This company is not likely to build a public cloud in Slovenia any time
soon," Ballmer said. Instead, Microsoft would like to sell a set of
products built around its Azure cloud services that a country like Slovenia can
buy and implement itself.
The potential benefits of cloud computing for companies
and researchers are immense, Ballmer said. For instance, he talked about how
bringing the world's poorest out of poverty will likely mean that those people
will consume more energy. "We need to speed up the rate of scientific
innovation" that can help solve climate change issues before that happens,
he said. Researchers might be better able to run experiments quickly and
analyze more data if they are able to access public cloud services, he said.
The cloud "will create opportunities for all the
folks in this room to do important research and build important projects,"
Ballmer said.
The hosted computing model creates new possibilities
for businesses too. "I think we are seeing and will continue to see where
there are literally new software investments that create new business models,
new opportunities to start and form businesses because of this commercial
software infrastructure that's never existed before," he said.
For instance, a new company might only have the
resources to offer a product to people in its local community. But if it can
use hosted computing, it can offer the product to a wider audience, paying for
the compute services as it uses them rather than investing in a data center up
front.
Ballmer also suggested that the cloud might even make
some open-source developers more interested in commercializing their
developments. "With the advent of this new commercial infrastructure, some
inventors can now ask, how can I monetize this, how can I get an economic value
from the innovations that I get a chance to create," he said.
Cloud computing is here. Running applications on
machines in an Internet-accessible data center can bring plenty of advantages.
Yet wherever they run, applications are built on some kind of platform. For
on-premises applications, this platform usually includes an operating system,
some way to store data, and perhaps more. Applications running in the cloud
need a similar foundation. The goal of Microsoft’s Windows Azure is to provide
this. Part of the larger Azure Services Platform, Windows Azure is a platform
for running Windows applications and storing data in the cloud.
Cloud computing is a style of computing in which
dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service
over the Internet. To deploy a new solution, most of your time and energy is
spent on defining the right infrastructure, hardware and software, to put
together to create that solution, cloud computing allows people to share resources
to solve new problems. Cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditure
(CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for
what they use.
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