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Within a year, 90% of Microsoft employees will be working on cloud-related projects
That's a lot of man hours going into cloud computing, and Microsoft must surely be dwarfing any and all of its competitors' efforts. Perhaps that's why Ballmer went on to say they are "betting our company" on the cloud -- though with almost $80 billion in assets, I dare say they can afford a mistake or two during their initial foray into the cloud.
PaidContent has a great break-down of Ballmer's (epic) University of Washington speech. In short: more tailored surfing/search experiences (a la Google); privacy remains a big concern; and, citing the new Windows Phone 7, Ballmer suggests that the device you use to access a service is perhaps more important than the browser itself.
There's also a neat Microsoft Cloud Services website too, which I haven't seen before! (Warning, it has a noisy auto-playing video, grr...)
Comments
14
Subscribe to commentsTheOneAndOnlyJHMar 5th 2010 12:06PM
I find this a little hard to believe. Guaranteed 5% is corporate bigwigs, HR directors, and accounting, if not much more. Then you also have to take into account the marketing, sales, customer service, and legal departments. That's gotta be another big chunk, but let's say just 5%. Take away the 90% working on cloud services, and where's that leave us with MicroSoft's core products?
Does that mean we won't be getting any more updates to Windows? Windows Phone 7 Series won't receive any improvements? MS Office will no longer be updated offline? No Windows 8?
I would say Ballmer used a bit of hyperbole there. No way is MS devoting 90% of it's entire workforce to cloud services alone. They may be working to integrate cloud service and functionality to all of their software, but they won't be focusing 90% of their efforts solely on the cloud.
And I know it stated "cloud-related projects," but I don't know anyone who would refer to Windows 7 as a "cloud-related project." Focus on your OS's, MS. It's what you're best at, and the cloud should be secondary.
Sebastian AnthonyMar 5th 2010 12:24PM
Ya, I think it means 'all of their future projects will be connected to the cloud'.
Office 2010 is a 'cloud-related' project for example (and Office is their biggest department, I think).
NateMar 5th 2010 5:40PM
The article is a bit misleading. If you watch the speech, Ballmer states that "there are 40,000 MS employees worldwide, of which 70% are either working directly on cloud related projects, or on cloud-inspired projects. A year from now, that will be 90%."
Yes it sounds like Microsoft really is going "all-in". Cloud is more than just a fad or a buzzword now. A step in the right direction without a doubt (clouds are efficient, redundant, and provide a truly scalable environment).
Sebastian AnthonyMar 5th 2010 5:38PM
Curious... I wonder why the Wiki lists them at 93,000 employees. I guess they use different metrics to measure.
Sorry for the bad number!
NateMar 5th 2010 5:42PM
That's 40,000 software-related employees.
TheOneAndOnlyJHMar 5th 2010 6:37PM
@Nate
Now it all makes sense. So taking that 40,000 of the 93,000 employees are software engineers, that means 30% of overall MS employees are working on cloud-related projects, and 38% will be a year from now. Those are some numbers I can wrap my noggin around without shaking my head in disbelief.
I just couldn't believe the numbers before. There is no way a company with over ten people can have 90% working on product design. I worked for a small engineering research firm during college and out of our 12 people, there were still two secretaries and a CEO. (There would have been marketing too, but the engineers wrote up all the proposals for DOD contracts with help from University contacts.)
Well, now I can sleep happy knowing that people are still working on the unconnected parts of my OS experiences!
TaaiMar 5th 2010 12:43PM
Let's hope it will not start to rain...
SamMar 5th 2010 12:56PM
MS is well entrenched in its own world. It has been working for them so far. However, I believe the cloud can (and probably will) change things. In the future we won't care Mac, Windows, or Linux, or mobile devices, it's just data somewhere.
Can MS really embrace the anything-anywhere model?
I have also stated before MS works best on fat clients. They need to really work on their Mobile strategy before iPhone and Androids really eat their lunch.
Sebastian AnthonyMar 5th 2010 5:39PM
I think they can embrace any model, given a little time and the chance to throw money at it. Look at the Xbox!
But yeah, the whole as-a-service, device-independent thing has been a long time coming (since the Web became a huge part of our lives).
The next few years are gonna be a lot of fun, that's for sure.
SilverWaveMar 5th 2010 3:09PM
He is full of it... just like they renamed every thing .net now they say cloud. FAIL
Quote from MJF
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=5491&tag=col1;post-5491
Oh yeah. Azure …. When most pundits and industry observers talk about Microsoft and its cloud strategy, they mean Azure. I bet a lot of Microsoft’s customers and developers think this way, too. Ballmer made very few references in his UW talk today to Azure — maybe because on the Azure cloud front, Microsoft is playing catch up (at least timing-wise) to others already out there, including Amazon, Google, Salesforce and more.
Sebastian AnthonyMar 5th 2010 5:42PM
Nothing wrong with a little branding, if only for the consumer's sake! (As long as they're not misled...)
EldiabloMar 6th 2010 9:52AM
I hope it pays off - we're currently testing the BPOS suite and its pants. Especially the hosted OCS where you can't even connect using a Windows Mobile Classic and the OCS software. They need to reproduce the functionality of a server in the cloud, but as yet they've not delivered.
zbeasytMar 5th 2010 6:04PM
Working on cloud projects? What does that even mean?
Every time I hear, it's in the cloud, where working on the cloud.
I want to kick the person who said it in the nuts.
zbeast
gonzalo.ruiz.cMar 14th 2010 4:55PM
Cloud computing is a broad term, the most accepted definition about cloud computing is the NIST definition (http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/cloud-def-v15.doc)
Azure is one part of Microsoft cloud strategy formerly called S+S strategy. In this strategy a broad set of products (and future projects) are included, like Azure, SQL Azure ,BPOS,Office 2010 (have a look to Office Web Apps)
S+S combines the strengthens of two worlds, the software installed on every device (and on computers) and software services available from Internet, so Microsoft will also support and strive traditional software.