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Survey Says: Web Infrastructure and the Last Big Microsoft OS
Posted on Thursday, December 14 2006 @ 15:54:11 EST by linuxwiz |
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Gartner released a number of predictions for 2007 on Wednesday with
the biggest being that Vista will be Microsoft's last major release of
the Windows operating system.
Normally, I view such speculation with a healthy dose of skepticism
but two things happened this week to make me think that maybe this
prediction is more right than wrong.
The first was that in talks with a number of vendors this week, it
became clear that web infrastructure is top priority next year.
Increased activity online and rising adoption rates of web services and
service-oriented architecture (SOA) will be the biggest growth area for
vendors serving the datacenter. And the virtualization trend that's
poised to takeoff like a rocket? It will likely be be fueled by the web
infrastructure buildout to support more and more enterprise
applications migrating to web-based services.
Linux and Open Source is the platform of choice for web services and SOA and, therefore, of web infrastructure.
Which brings me to my second point: the survey results released this
week concerning customer support of the Microsoft - Novell alliance.
The survey was a poll of 200 enterprise executives with businesses
of 500 PCs or more and the results aren't incredibly important (80-90%
of respondents would like software vendors to work well together.
Hardly earth-shaking). That the survey was released at all is what's
interesting.
As press I see a great many vendor alliances and the vast majority
never amount to much. Earlier this year, for example, Microsoft and
Nortel announced an alliance designed to completely revolutionize
enterprise communications and productivity forever. Once the
hype died down -- and it did quickly -- it became pretty clear that
little if anything would actually ship out of the partnership. But it
made for great press.
Microsoft - Novell also made for great press and MSFT could have
easily have let the buzz die down and gone on their merry way. But they
didn't. They're doing surveys about how great OS vendor cooperation is.
They're keeping this alliance top of mind for a very good reason. They
need to show how well they work with the platform that's going to power
the next generation of applications.
MSFT can see that the future of monolithic applications is rapidly
coming to an end. Everyone may not be using Google Spreadsheets today
but the fact that they even exist should be a concern for the company.
As we all know, Microsoft tends to storm into markets a bit late;
see Internet Explorer, Office, the Zune media player. And when they do,
the value proposition they present is usually tempered with a healthy
dose of lock-in; binding the browser to the OS, closed document
formats, DRM.
Software as a service, by contrast, is about openness and it will be
difficult for MSFT to apply their unique brand of user loyalty to the
next-generation of applications. That's why they're pushing so hard on
this idea that they're willing to cooperate with Linux, they can
release Open Source software, that they can be your platform...
It sounds great. But ask any parole officer, old habits die hard.
Source
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