Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles (its first in three years) is classic Ray Ozzie. Historically, the software company has always trailed important technology developments far in advance of their availability – a tactic that has the benefit of securing mindshare among developers, but also opens it to the criticism of talking up “vapourware” in order to undermine competitors.
That is not Ozzie’s style. When I caught up with him for a few minutes this week, the Microsoft chief software architect said that there had been some pressure internally to talk about aspects of the company’s new “cloud platform” earlier, but that’s not the way he likes to do it. He wanted to wait until Microsoft had something concrete to demonstrate.
The result has been a deluge of announcements over the past two days, as Microsoft has shown off what amounts to a complete new software framework for the Web age. It starts with Windows Azure, the operating system for the cloud. On top of that are tools for creating Web-based applications and a range of new services that turn it into a full-fledged online platform for corporate IT developers. This is a framework that Ozzie sketched out in concept some time ago, but has now spelled out in great detail.
With so much to digest, I asked Ozzie what he thought was particularly significant about this week’s developments but which might have been lost in the broader announcements. He pointed to the simple mechanism Microsoft had put in place so that corporate IT managers could shift some of their users to the “cloud”:
The subtle connection is that in order to do that, there is one one-click thing that the enterprise IT does that takes all their enterprise users who are in Active Directory, which is our directory product, and it connects them to the cloud in that one button click. Once they do that, those same authenticated users are available to any ISV [third-party software developer] who puts their business app up in our platform.
So, in essence, what’s being created is a new — I’m looking for an analogy that’s a reasonable analogy. It’s a new marketplace potentially. Without this, every ISV who wanted to ship a service to an enterprise would have to require every enterprise user to create another logon ID - another logon ID times 100,000 users in the enterprise.
I mean, this is really the birth of broad-based viability of business apps… to be delivered to businesses online. It’s not just about a Salesforce.com. It’s not just about a Netsuite or a Microsoft who would deliver their one app. This basically says, look, the enterprise is going to manage a console, a portal. They’ll provision these users for these apps and these for these, and they’ll be able to deal with services in a way that they deal with software right now on their premises. And I think that’s actually a very big deal.
Others, from Salesforce.com to SAP, also have ambitions to become platform companies, supporting new software marketplaces like this. But if it can come up with easy answers to thorny problems like identity management for online services, Microsoft looks well-positioned retain its strong following among developers as it tries to move to the cloud.
