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| Microsoft, in the clouds |
On the 4th, Steve Ballmer participated in a webcast at the University of Washington, and made an important statement: that Microsoft's future is in the cloud. To illustrate this assertion, he provided a couple of data: not more than 70% of the company's more than 40,000 employees are working on cloud computing initiatives today, and the percentage is expected to come To 90% next year.
The statement is extremely interesting because it clearly marks a before and after in the strategy of a company that many still consider linked to its image of the last decade of the twentieth century, the idea of a completely computer-centric world. But aside from interesting, Steve Ballmer's statement would have to fit it into the most important transformations ever suffered by a company: it is quite pertinent to illustrate the news with the graph recently published by Business Insider analyzing the sources of Microsoft's benefits: These come from the licenses of Windows, Office, and the products and tools for servers. The chart provides very revealing data: the games and entertainment division, the often acclaimed XBox, provides intermittent profit and loss, and maintains a highly discrete net performance, while online services represent a growing source of losses. The contrast with the same graph applied to Google, where profits come in overwhelming majority of an activity, advertising on sites managed by the company, completely linked to the network, makes clear the extent of competition between both companies (and The possible vulnerabilities of both). But they also allow us to assess the magnitude of the change that Ballmer describes in his speech: a change that is clearly necessary, but which will mean turning the company up and down like a real sock.
That Microsoft can make such a strategic turn is something positive for everyone: competition has always been a good thing. But because of its "shady past", we also have to be very aware of the conditions of those services in the cloud that the company proposes: one of the key factors to take into account in the evolution towards a world in the cloud is Interoperability and the opening of different systems, which prevent clients from being captive to a given option due to the absence of valid standards of generalized acceptance. Having saved those details, a temptation in which we hope that the company of Redmond does not fall again, the strategic turn of the company can be described as of very good news.
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