You’d be forgiven for being confused over the ‘no infrastructure’ play coming out of Microsoft’s Boston Tea Party partner conference held in Boston. There’s plenty of comment and Josh Greenbaum’s take is certainly worthy of attention – if only for the laughs. Sorry Josh – the rhetoric might be great for a showman like Steve Ballmer but when you stand back, it is asinine to suggest you can forget about infrastructure.
Phil Wainewright, who ripped into Microsoft over their non-CRM Live announcement noted that channel partners are livid at what’s being said, effectively arguing that Microsoft’s technical components are far from adequate. We all have experience of that don’t we? Those that stick with Microsoft that is 
What I don’t understand in all this is how Microsoft thinks it can side step the infrastructure issues. It’s all very well talking about a raft of future product and, presumably services – but it creates a lot of confusion in the marketplace.
Developing for internet applications that operate as a collection of services is very different to the current client/server style of product. There’s a lot of operational things you don’t need but as sure as night follows day, there are other considerations. Your desktop machines should now have a much longer operating life. But, your data storage requirements will explode. Everyone gets upset about security but I don’t think this is the big issue people imagine.
The perceptual issue is much harder to overcome. When you read that professionals still have problems with HMRC online systems, it is hard to get those same people to have faith in internet based services.
But in the end, it all comes down to one simple problem. Microsoft is conflicted and has not figured out how it can bring its partners – and ultimately that means you as customers – along with its next generation of products and services. When products become services, the middleman channel as it exists today is no longer that important in the conventional sense. Saying that users can forget about infrastructure should be a warning bell. Anytime a tech vendor says this or that is not relevant, they’re asking for trouble.
A bigger problem lies in the potential for re-engineering product to work on the new platforms. Would it be a selling point to say: “We integrate with Office 2007?” I doubt it when even to this day, most users only touch a fraction of what’s available. And why would you do that if a large part of your real work is being done out on the Internet?
My feeling is that unless Microsoft works this out, a raft of nimbler, more customer savvy service providers will quietly slip in and drag the rug from under Microsoft’s feet. Salesforce.com is the poster child for this. Why? Because it will be commercially sensible for customers to operate using easily assembled services rather than continuing to pay Microsoft taxes.
