I love analogies, and two immediately come to mind following Bill Gates’ keynote at the recent Microsoft TechEd event. How about: Microsoft’s move into mega-datacentres and Software as a Service is like using the latest race car aerodynamics theories to design a horse and cart. It should go fast in theory, except that it is still actually pulled by horses – lots of them, to be sure, but still horses. Or, it’s like deciding that the best way to get to the moon is to start by building a very, very long bridge.   Gates’ Keynote showed that he has discovered The Cloud, but it seems he is still viewing it as just another way for Microsoft to deliver `applications’ rather than as a platform for `services’. This poses two alternative problems, one for users and one for Microsoft itself.  

If Microsoft succeeds with promoting the idea of The Cloud as an application delivery vehicle, and it certainly has the marketing muscle to achieve it, users could well find themselves disadvantaged. If they feel that they are still working with traditional applications in the traditional manner, it may well give them a great feeling of comfort. But it is quite likely that they will soon find themselves increasingly disadvantaged against competitors that do adopt a service-based approach. They are likely to gain greater operational flexibility and agility in the way they can serve their respective markets, meet changing customer demand, and adapt their business processes in order to manage those changes. 

The other problem if Microsoft succeeds is that considerable confusion may exist amongst users. The whole issue of moving users from a pay-up-front permanent licence acquisition business model to an annuity model is one of the main stumbling blocks of the shift to any service-based, per-per-use model, particularly from the vendors’ point of view. If Microsoft tries to sell the idea on the basis of users still `having their applications’ it could end up with a good deal of egg on its face from the mixed messages.  

A side issue of this is that Microsoft is joining the race to build vast datacentres, all obviously based upon multicore x86 architecture processors. But this itself poses a number of problems, not least being that the levels and volumes of service that will be required will push heavily towards the need for complex, parallel processing architectures. There are some doubts here as to how effective large, Windows-based multicore x86 devices can be in such an environment. It has to be noted that IBM’s latest supercomputer now makes extensive use of Cell architecture processors to break the PetaFlop barrier.  

Windows as an operating system has just about reached the limit of its capabilities with 8-core processors, while Microsoft’s recent track record in this area -
Vista showing that it seems to have started to miss the sweet spot for business users – suggests that this trend may become more prominent as datacentres become huge and hugely oriented towards service-delivery. There has to be some doubt as to whether the company now has the right background for building systems capable of running a Very Large Datacentre delivering billions of dynamically assembled, loosely coupled code components as millions of individual, short-lived service entities.