Stephen Rosenfeld's List: Software-plus-services

• synchronize files across many devices, access your files directly from the Web, easily share them with others and get notified whenever someone changes a file.
• potential for developers world-wide to mesh applications and devices far beyond Microsoft’s own products. 

• Looking Ahead

    

  Microsoft’s progressive shift toward Software-plus-Services is reshaping and transforming our existing offerings—and informing our roadmap for the future.   Take a look ahead at what a future of connected software and services could bring to the world.  Applications and services that once stood apart become far more valuable when taken together.  Business moves faster, ideas flow more freely and people grow more deeply connected.

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• The Windows 7 versions of all these programs will be offered to Windows customers as individual options in a package collectively dubbed Windows Live Essentials. That doesn’t mean they’re going to be browser-based products. They’re going to be traditional standalone Windows applications, with the crucial distinction that the primary delivery (and update) mechanism will be the Windows Live website. Each of these products has the capability to integrate with web-based Windows Live Services, but they’ll work just fine on their own.
• Blame it on the courts, which have significantly constrained what Microsoft can do with anything that’s a part of Windows.
• Microsoft is clearly betting that many if not most OEMs delivering consumer products will want to include the most recent Windows Live package as part of the default Windows installation. If they succeed, they get rid of a longstanding headache and remove another item from the checklist of Windows annoyances that corporate customers and power users complain about so regularly.
• n the process, they also create an opportunity for alternative service providers, most notably Google

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• Published:01-June-2006

  By BR staff writer

  Microsoft Corp's biggest challenge is embracing software-as-a-service business models, as embodied by rival Google Inc, chief executive Steve Ballmer told investors yesterday.

• seeking to reassure Wall Street that Microsoft's surprise $2bn increase in R&D spending, revealed a month ago, is justified.

  To paraphrase him heavily, the takeaway was: Yes, we're investing a lot, but it's riskier, long-term, not to do so. We have a lot of cool stuff coming up and, yes, we are also playing catch-up on a couple of fronts.

  "We've got to make this transition, which our industry is making, from software as a product to software as a service," he said. "If you want to be a leading software company, you've got to be a leading software-as-a-service company,"

  This transition is "not optional", he said, which could indicate enthusiasm or reluctance, depending on your point of view.
• There was one big opportunity - advertising as a software business - where we weren't first," he said, with a nod to Google. "Being a little bit more generous on R&D, rather than a little less, I think is a smart thing."

• Last week, for example, Dell Inc agreed to put Google software on its new PCs, and to make Google the default search engine. Ballmer acknowledged Google's win, but suggested that the company paid a heavy price.

  "Everybody's going to have to decide at what level they want to pay," he said.
• He added that, contrary to some statements in the past, that it is not so much Google that is Microsoft's chief competitor nowadays, rather it is the new type of software business model that Google represents.

• If you look at it competitively... the issue really isn't any one company, Google or anyone else," he said. "The question is, how do we get on top of and really drive business model transformations."

  "Open source was a new business model," he said. "It took us a few years to really understand what it takes to compete."

  While several analysts at yesterday's event were keen to pursue questions about R&D and the Google threat,

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• Working Smarter

     A services transformation across our industry has been catalyzed by confluence of factors.  It begins with cheap computing and cheap storage combined with the increasing ubiquity of high-bandwidth connectivity to the internet.   It is compounded by an explosion in PC innovation—from the high-end desktop, to the low-end net-top.  And it is extended by an explosion in device innovation, including media players, smart phones, and internet-connected devices of all forms and sizes.   When it’s put together seamlessly, the result for consumers and business is compelling.

• IM and e-mail

   

  Stay in touch. With Messenger, you can chat, swap photos, and see what’s new with friends. Mail brings together your Hotmail, Gmail, and other accounts, along with multiple calendars.

  Messenger
  Mail

• IM and e-mail

   

  Stay in touch. With Messenger, you can chat, swap photos, and see what’s new with friends. Mail brings together your Hotmail, Gmail, and other accounts, along with multiple calendars.

• Photos and movies

   

  Use Photo Gallery and Movie Maker to edit and organize your photos and movies, and then post them online or send them to friends.

  Photo Gallery
  Movie Maker beta

• Blogging

   

  With Windows Live Writer, blogging is a breeze. You can add photos and videos, format everything just so, and publish to most blogging services.

  Writer

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• remote code execution if an affected system received a specially crafted RPC request. On Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 systems, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability without authentication to run arbitrary code. It is possible that this vulnerability could be used in the crafting of a wormable exploit.

• Software plus Services ^[1] describes the idea of combining hosted services with capabilities that are best achieved with locally running software. It describes composite applications created by combining traditional software with remote services to provide consistent and seamlessly integrated user experience across devices and form factors. Software plus Services is a concept that Software as a Service (SaaS) complements the traditional packaged software running on both client or server by services adding value.
• Offline Capability - The offline story, Software + Service paradigm allows you to work offline with your data and then automatically synchronizes it on the cloud. Disconnected or occasionally connected software which is the right solution for many road warriors and also for folks who work from home and not have the same kind of bandwidth and don’t/can’t be always connected.
• Powerful Devices - As the computing devices get more powerful, more efficiency can be achieved by having software running locally and syncing as and when needed.
• Windows Azure and Azure Services Platform (Windows Azure is a collection of cloud-based services, including Live framework, .Net Services, SQL Services, CRM services, SharePoint services, and Windows Azure foundation services for compute, storage, and management)
• iPhone SDK
• Microsoft Outlook

  • Microsoft still considers this software as a product.
• Google – Google's mobile platform called “Android” will help vendors build software for mobile phones. Also Google appliance and Apps ^[5] is a software plus services solution. The Google Chrome browser, which also installs Google Gears software on the desktop to enable offline/online solutions, is an example of software-plus-services.

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• Free for K-12 and higher education
• No third-party banner ads in webmail UI for current students
• Free for K-12 and higher education
• Students keep their e-mail after they graduate

• Apps students want

   

  A co-branded email inbox students can use as their primary account; Office Live Workspace to save, access, and share documents and files online; plus more of the things that encourage collaboration.

   

  Works with what you have

   

  Live@edu works with the devices your students already use, and integrates with the infrastructure you already have.

   

  Reliable Infrastructure

   

  Outsource the time and cost of spam-filtering, server uptime and ongoing maintenance to Microsoft’s enterprise-class infrastructure.

   

  Safety and Privacy

   

  Keep your students’ data private and help keep them safer online.
• Customized UI
• Free for K-12 and higher education

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• A line-of-business application is unlikely to exist as an island, even when it is externally sourced. A good example is payroll. The payroll service provider needs raw data: employee name, pay amount and so on, to process payroll monthly. In this example, the data could be supplied via a simple extract of the relevant information from the internal HR system. Clearly, e-mailing an XLS or CSV file to the payroll provider is unlikely to provide the level of security/ confidentiality needed, so another form of data exchange is required, and IT will be expected to provide this. In other words, IT faces an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) project.

• synchronizing data and connecting multiple devices

• Software-plus-Services is the next logical step in the evolution of computing.  It represents an industry shift toward a design approach that is neither exclusively software-centric nor browser-centric.  By deeply and genuinely combining the best aspects of software with the best aspects of cloud-based services, we can deliver more compelling solutions for consumers, developers and businesses.

• Windows Azure is the cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides you on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications and services in Microsoft data centers.